By Sean Salai – The Washington Times – Wednesday, February 19, 2025
The Trump administration on Wednesday canceled $226 million in federal grants earmarked for meetings and reports on diversity needs in K-12 schools.
The Department of Education said the Comprehensive Centers program that the grants funded produced work that ranged from a video instructing teachers to “flick that White man off your shoulders” to a joint video call urging schools to “move away from the [sex] binary” of male and female to “use non-heteronormative language.”
“These grants went to a network of regional and national centers funded to provide scalable ’capacity-building’ services to states and systems within their regions, including reports and convenings to improve instructional materials and educational outcomes,” the federal agency said in a statement. “Instead, Comprehensive Centers have been forcing radical agendas onto states and systems, including race-based discrimination and gender identity ideology.”
The Washington Times first reported the news.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, a senior Education Department official said the decision to pull back 18 grants awarded under the Comprehensive Centers program came after a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) review flagged them as “not aligned and not impactful” for student learning.
“The money goes toward supporting divisive ideologies, not helping your kids read or write,” the official told The Times.
A page on the federal agency’s website shows that most of the grants awarded in fiscal 2024 went to five nonprofit education companies. They have received billions of dollars since the program’s inception in 2005 to operate “capacity-building” services for state and local agencies.
Westat Inc. received $6 million last year to operate a National Comprehensive Center, $5.03 million for a Southwest Comprehensive Center, and $1.8 million for an Appalachia Comprehensive Center.
In a redacted copy of its grant application, the Bethesda, Maryland, company pledged to hold meetings and issue reports on chronic absenteeism, mental health problems, shortages of minority teachers and “long-standing inequities in access and opportunity” in public schools.
Westat said it would “gather input from diverse sources” by meeting with federal officials and “educators serving students in foster care, students in households with incomes below the federal poverty level, students experiencing homelessness, migrant students, students with disabilities and multilingual learners.”
McRel International received $3.6 million in taxpayer-funded grants, Education Northwest $3.05 million, the Research Triangle Institute $1.55 million and the American Institutes for Research in the Behavioral Sciences over $8 million in grants to operate similar centers.
Conservatives have called the diversity program a waste of tax dollars that potentially violated President Trump’s recent executive orders that there are “only two genders, male and female,” and banning diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives in federally funded programs.
The anonymous Education Department official cited a 2019 report on the program that cost $8 million to produce. It concluded it was impossible “to measure the causal impacts of the Centers’ work and that much of the findings were based on the perceptions of the Centers’ own staff and recipients identified by the staff.”
Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, published excerpts of the centers’ materials Tuesday on X.com. He noted that they also urged educators to address “institutionalized privilege” and reduce an overrepresentation of “White students” in lucrative science, technology, engineering and math programs.
In an undated video that Mr. Rufo posted from the Comprehensive Centers Network, an unnamed official exhorts teachers to resist the “settler patriarchy” and the “White gaze.”
“This is taxpayer-funded witchcraft,” Mr. Rufo wrote. “It must be defunded.”
The Trump administration, which has pledged to eliminate the Education Department, has moved swiftly over the past month to slash what it sees as wasteful government spending as it works to eliminate $2 trillion from the federal deficit.
The department canceled $881 million in contracts for education research on Feb. 10, targeting programs that DOGE flagged as examples of waste with no proven benefits for student performance.
Last Thursday, the department axed another $368 million in contracts and grants for Regional Educational Laboratories and Equity Assistance Centers which it cited for “wasteful and ideologically driven spending not in the interest of students and taxpayers.”
On Monday, the federal agency cut another $600 million in grants to nonprofits it said “were using taxpayer funds to train teachers and education agencies in divisive ideologies” through mandatory anti-racism lessons.
Counting Wednesday’s cuts, the roughly $2.1 billion in purged programs will still only represent a small slice of the Education Department’s $79.1 billion budget.
Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, pledged in a Senate confirmation hearing last Thursday to “reorient the department” toward spending that directly serves student academic performance.
Since returning to office last month, President Trump has directed the Education Department to earmark discretionary funds for school voucher programs and new guidance for states to use federal dollars to support them.
Most Democrats, education nonprofits, teachers’ unions and their allies have accused the White House of seeking to undermine performance by cutting research and programs for struggling children.
“McMahon supports Trump’s extremist policies, which will divert needed education funding to private schools, make class sizes larger, create more schools without books and equipment, and undermine protections for students with disabilities, students of color, and those who are LGBTQIA+,” Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director and CEO of the advocacy group MomsRising, said in a statement Wednesday.
