The Education Department will have to reconsider discontinued mental health grants.
As AFROTECH™ previously reported, the Education Department cut more than 200 mental health grants totaling $1 billion in 2025 that supported recipients’ diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts in hiring, recruitment, training, and certification practices. The department said in a news release the discontinued grants favored “the racial characteristics of providers and divisive ideologies, instead of focusing on competent provision of proven mental health interventions for students.”
The funding had been funneled through the department’s Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration Grant Program (MHSP) and its School-Based Mental Health Services Grant Program (SBMH), per the news release. Several districts sued the Education Department over the discontinuation of the grants.
This was reflected in the “Washington v. U.S. Department of Education” case, which addressed mental health funding cuts affecting elementary and secondary schools, according to the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. The suit was filed June 30, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington by the following states: Washington, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.
In July 2025, the plaintiffs requested that the court “issue an order rescinding the unlawful Non-Continuation Decision and enjoining Defendants from discontinuing Program grants based on new priorities,” per the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
Later in October 2025, the court rejected the defendants’ motion to dismiss and granted the plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, ruling the states had standing on behalf of their public education institutions, per the outlet. The court also pointed to their “fiscal harm from indirect effects of funding cuts to private education institutions,” according to the case breakdown.
After the Education Department filed an appeal in November, it announced a new round of grants for the Mental Health Service Professional Demonstration and School-Based Mental Health programs in December 2025, according to the news release. This funding totaled more than $208 million and benefited 65 recipients, the majority being from “rural states and school districts.”
However, a federal judge for the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied the appeal in late February and has requested that the grants be reinstated for the 16 states that had filed the lawsuit, according to K-12 Dive.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals stated that “the defendants acted arbitrarily and capriciously by abruptly applying new, unpublished political priorities to cancel existing multi-year funding,” per court documents. It further determined that the department “failed to make a strong showing that it engaged in the reasoned decision-making required” to discontinue the grants.
K-12 Dive noted that the court’s ruling does not require the department to send funds to the states that sued. However, the department will have to consider whether it will still discontinue recipients’ grants.
