Trump administration cutting $1B in school mental health funding over DEI
The Department of Education will not renew $1 billion in mental health funding for schools, citing concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the contracts.
The funding came from a bipartisan gun violence bill signed by former President Biden that gave schools the money to hire mental health workers and counselors for students.
'These grants are intended to improve American students' mental health by funding additional mental health professionals in schools and on campuses. 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,' said Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Education Department.
'We owe it to American families to ensure that tax-payer dollars are supporting evidence-based practices that are truly focused on improving students' mental health,' she added.
The news was first reported by Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, on social media platform X, including excerpts of the grant documents, which list goals to hire a certain number of minority and diverse counselors for schools.
Rufo alleged the grants 'were being used to advance left-wing racialism and discrimination. No more slush fund for activists under the guise of mental health.'
In a notice to members of Congress obtained by The Associated Press, the Department of Education said it would support the mental health of students in other ways.
'The Department plans to re-envision and re-compete its mental health program funds to more effectively support students' behavioral health needs,' the notice said.
The move comes as the Education Department has cut millions in education research funding over alleged DEI efforts.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court sided with the federal agency in allowing millions of dollars of grants to be blocked to teacher preparation programs the Education Department deemed was inculcated with DEI efforts.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
NBC Sports
25 minutes ago
- NBC Sports
Stephen A. Smith: Failure to buy Bills sparked Donald Trump's first presidential run
Nearly 10 years ago to the day, a certain someone took a certain ride down a certain golden escalator and most certainly upended American politics. As Stephen A. Smith told it on Monday night's edition of The Daily Show, the rise of Donald Trump the politician is tied directly to his inability to buy the Buffalo Bills a year before he threw his hat in the presidential ring. 'In 2014, he wanted to purchase the NFL's Buffalo Bills,' Smith told Jon Stewart. 'The price tag was $1.4 billion. . . . My sources tell me he had $1.1 [billion]. . . . He literally called me in 2014 and he said, 'Stephen, I'm going to tell you this right now' — and this is a quote — 'if them mutherfuckers get in my way, I'm gonna get them all back. I'm gonna run for president.' Those are his exact words. 'And so the NFL often jokes with me, 'So it's our fault' when I tell them that story. And I say, 'Yeah.'' This prompted Stewart to make a direct plea to the camera: 'People of Buffalo. Give him the fucking team. Save us.' Smith explained Trump's viewpoint on the matter. 'He was putting the word out that if this doesn't happen — he wanted to do it, and this should happen, I'm Donald Trump, I'm very popular and well known, I'm worth over a billion dollars, I should be able to purchase an NFL team if I want it,' Smith said. 'And if I can't get it, it's because they're getting in my way. That was his position. Their position was, 'You didn't have enough money.'' And he didn't. Because at the end of the day that's all it takes to buy an NFL team: Come up with the best offer. Terry and Kim Pegula came up with a better offer than the twice future president. But, yes, there's an alternate universe in which Trump owns the Bills and he isn't the president and he calls in to PFT Live on a regular basis to complain that the league office is being very unfair.
Yahoo
25 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Bessent Returns to Washington as US-China Talks Stretch On
(Bloomberg) — SUS Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent departed trade talks with China late Tuesday in London, as delegations continued to negotiate over key tech and industrial exports and deescalating their trade war. Trump's Military Parade Has Washington Bracing for Tanks and Weaponry NY Long Island Rail Service Resumes After Grand Central Fire NYC Mayoral Candidates All Agree on Building More Housing. But Where? Senator Calls for Closing Troubled ICE Detention Facility in New Mexico California Pitches Emergency Loans for LA, Local Transit Systems Bessent told reporters he had to return to Washington in order to testify before Congress. US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer planned to continue discussions with their Chinese counterparts 'as needed,' Bessent said. 'We have had two days of productive talks, they are ongoing,' the Treasury secretary said before leaving Lancaster House, a Georgian-era mansion near Buckingham Palace serving as the meeting site. Financial markets were closely watching Tuesday as the world's largest economies continued talks over the terms of their tariff truce brokered last month. US stocks rose to session highs after Lutnick said earlier the talks were 'going really, really well.' The teams, which had been led by Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, were still holding discussions Tuesday night in order to iron out technical details, according to a Treasury official. The key issue this week is re-establishing terms of an agreement reached in Geneva last month, in which the US understood that China would allow more rare earth shipments to reach American customers. The Trump administration accused Beijing of moving too slowly, which threatened shortages in domestic manufacturing sectors. In return, the Trump administration is prepared to remove a recent spate of measures targeting chip design software, jet engine parts, chemicals and nuclear materials, people familiar with the matter said. Many of those actions were taken in the past few weeks as tensions flared between the US and China. 'Win by China' 'A US decision to roll back some portion of the technology controls would very much be viewed as a win by China,' said Dexter Roberts, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council's Global China Hub, adding that the possibility of unwinding 'any controls' seemed 'pretty much unthinkable' until recently. A month ago Beijing and Washington agreed to a 90-day truce through mid-August in their crippling tariffs to allow time to resolve many of their trade disagreements — from tariffs to export controls. Lancaster House carries historical significance. It has hosted major addresses by UK prime ministers, speeches by central bank governors and parties for Britain's royal family. At the same time, Trump's trade team is scrambling to secure bilateral deals with India, Japan, South Korea and several other countries that are racing to do so before July 9, when the US president's so-called reciprocal tariffs rise from the current 10% baseline to much higher levels customized for each trading partner. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday held his first phone conversation with South Korea's newly elected President Lee Jae-myung and called for cooperation to safeguard multilateralism and free trade. 'We should strengthen bilateral cooperation and multilateral coordination, jointly safeguard multilateralism and free trade, and ensure the stability and smoothness of global and regional industrial chains and supply chains,' Xi said, according to the CCTV report. —With assistance from Colum Murphy and Stephanie Lai. New Grads Join Worst Entry-Level Job Market in Years American Mid: Hampton Inn's Good-Enough Formula for World Domination The Spying Scandal Rocking the World of HR Software Cavs Owner Dan Gilbert Wants to Donate His Billions—and Walk Again The SEC Pinned Its Hack on a Few Hapless Day Traders. The Full Story Is Far More Troubling ©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
Hamilton Spectator
28 minutes ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Trump administration says he has the authority to cancel national monuments that protect landscapes
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Lawyers for President Donald Trump's administration say he has the authority to abolish national monuments meant to protect historical and archaeological sites across broad landscapes, including two in California created by his predecessor at the request of Native American tribes. A Justice Department legal opinion released Tuesday disavowed a 1938 determination that monuments created by previous presidents under the Antiquities Act can't be revoked. The department said presidents can cancel monument designations if protections aren't warranted. The finding comes as the Interior Department under Trump has been weighing changes to monuments across the nation as part of the administration's push to expand U.S. energy production. The Republican in his first term reduced the size of two Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments in Utah, calling them a 'massive land grab.' He also lifted fishing restrictions within a sprawling marine monument off the New England Coast. Former President Joe Biden reversed the moves and restored the monuments. noting that Bears Ears was the first national monument to be established at the request of federally recognized tribes. The two monuments singled out in the new Justice Department opinion were designated by Biden in his final days in office: Chuckwalla National Monument, in Southern California near Joshua Tree National Park, and Sáttítla Highlands National Monument, in Northern California. The Democrat's declarations for the monuments barred oil and natural gas drilling and mining on the 624,000-acre (2,400-square-kilometer) Chuckwalla site, and the roughly 225,000 acres (800 square kilometers) Sáttítla Highlands site near the California-Oregon border. Chuckwalla has natural wonders including the Painted Canyon of Mecca Hills and Alligator Rock, and it is home to rare species of plants and animals like the desert bighorn sheep and the Chuckwalla lizard. The Sáttítla Highlands include the ancestral homelands of and are sacred to the Pit River Tribe and Modoc Peoples. All but three presidents have used the 1906 Antiquities Act to protect unique landscapes and cultural resources, and about half the national parks in the U.S. were first designated as monuments. But critics of monument designations under Biden and Obama say the protective boundaries were stretched too far, hindering mining for critical minerals. Deputy Assistant Attorney General Lanora Pettit wrote in the Trump administration opinion that Biden's protections of Chuckwalla and the Sattítla Highlands were part of the Democrat's attempts to create for himself an environmental legacy that includes more places to hike, bike, camp or hunt. 'Such activities are entirely expected in a park, but they are wholly unrelated to (if not outright incompatible with) the protection of scientific or historical monuments,' Pettit wrote. Trump in April lifted commercial fishing prohibitions within an expansive marine monument in the Pacific Ocean created under former President Barack Obama. Environmental groups have anticipated more actions against monuments by Trump since his first days in office. They said Tuesday's Justice Department opinion doesn't give him the authority to shrink monuments at will. 'Americans overwhelmingly support our public lands and oppose seeing them dismantled or destroyed,' said Axie Navas with The Wilderness Society. Since 1912, presidents have issued more than a dozen proclamations that diminished monuments but did not outright revoke them, according to a National Park Service database. Dwight Eisenhower was most active in undoing the proclamations of his predecessors as he diminished six monuments, including Arches in Utah, Great Sand Dunes in Colorado and Glacier Bay in Alaska, which have all since become national parks. Trump's moves to shrink the Utah monuments in his first term were challenged by environmental groups that said protections for the sites safeguard water supplies and wildlife while preserving cultural sites. The reductions were reversed by Biden before the case was resolved, and it remains pending. President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act after lobbying by educators and scientists who wanted to protect sites from artifact looting and haphazard collecting by individuals. It was the first law in the U.S. to establish legal protections for cultural and natural resources of historic or scientific interest on federal lands.
