Education Department Cuts About $1b In Federal School Mental Health Grants

The Education Department is cutting approximately $1 billion worth of federal mental health grants approved by Congress in the wake of a 2022 Texas elementary school mass shooting, after the agency concluded the funding conflicts with Trump administration priorities.

The department’s decision, announced by an agency official late Tuesday in a written notice obtained by POLITICO, centers on grants included in the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that were meant to help states and higher education institutions train mental health professionals who could then work in local schools.

But the future of that funding, which won bipartisan support nearly three years ago in the wake of the Robb Elementary School shooting and included in the most significant gun safety legislation approved by Congress in decades, is now uncertain.

“The Department has undertaken individualized review of grants and determined those receiving these notices reflect the prior Administration’s priorities and policy preferences and conflict with those of the current Administration,” Brandy Brown, a deputy assistant secretary in the department’s legislative affairs office, wrote on Tuesday evening. “The prior Administration’s preferences are not legally binding.”

Brown said the department determined the mental health grantees were either violating the letter or purpose of federal civil rights law; conflicting with the department’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education”; or using federal funds inappropriately. The grant cancellation was first reported by The Associated Press.

The department “plans to re-envision and re-compete its mental health program funds to more effectively support students' behavioral health needs,” Brown said without elaborating.

A department spokesperson said the agency declined to continue funding the grants beyond their initial award terms.

"These grants are intended to improve American students' mental health by funding additional mental health professionals in schools and on campuses," department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said in a statement to POLITICO.

"Instead, under the deeply flawed priorities of the Biden Administration, grant recipients used the funding to implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas in ways that have nothing to do with mental health and could hurt the very students the grants are supposed to help," she said.