(WASHINGTON) — The Trump administration will not renew Biden-era grants worth $1 billion that were aimed at boosting mental health services in schools, a Department of Education spokesperson confirmed to ABC News.
“These grants are intended to improve American students’ mental health by funding additional mental health professionals in schools and on campuses,” Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications Madison Biedermann wrote in a statement to ABC News. “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.”
The decision comes as the Trump administration takes sweeping action to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs and alleged racial discrimination practices in schools. However, multiple courts have blocked efforts to ensure schools certify compliance with the administration’s demands.
The department said the grant programs were not advancing administration priorities. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo lauded the administration’s decision to discontinue the programs, alleging they intend to advance “left-wing racialism and discrimination.”
“No more slush fund for activists under the guise of mental health,” Rufo wrote in a post on X.
But American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called it a “direct attack” on the safety and well-being of children.
“They may not have agreed on everything, but Congress secured $1 billion in bipartisan mental health grants to help kids better understand themselves and the world around them,” Weingarten wrote in a statement. “The benefits were obvious. Now, with the stroke of a pen, that halting progress has been wiped away, even as the president and his allies insist that improving mental health is the only way to fix the gun violence epidemic.”
The grants were allocated under President Joe Biden’s signature Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. The BSCA, an anti-gun violence law signed after the mass school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in 2022, used “historic funding” to add more mental health services to schools over five years, according to former White House officials.
ABC News previously reported on the Biden administration prioritizing mental health services in schools during a youth crisis prompted by interrupted learning time and social isolation from the coronavirus pandemic.
The former president had indicated his goal was to double the number of school-based practitioners, including social workers, psychologists and counselors.
Dr. Tish Brookins, a certified social worker in Jefferson County, Kentucky, told ABC News that the Trump administration’s decision could result in “missed opportunities, deepened trauma, and diminished futures” for students across the country.
“This cut undermines every effort we’ve made to build safe, responsive, and equitable schools,” Brookins wrote in a statement.
“Mental health support in schools is not a luxury. It is a necessity,” she added.
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