Ema Alice: California Attorney General Rob Bonta has filed a lawsuit against the Trump Administration over what he calls the “unconstitutional, unlawful, and arbitrary decision to freeze funding for six longstanding programs administered by the U.S. Department of Education.”
According to Bonta, California has yet to receive almost $1 billion in federal education funding that has been “frozen” by the White House.
Twenty-three other states have joined the legal action saying the “funding freeze violates federal funding statutes and regulations authorizing these critical programs and appropriating funds for them, violates federal statutes governing the federal budgeting process, including the Anti-deficiency Act and Impoundment Control Act, and violates the constitutional separation of powers doctrine and the Presentment Clause. They ask the court for declaratory and injunctive relief.”
“We are supporting the lawsuit,” said Richard Barrera, vice president of the San Diego Unified School Board.
Barrera tells Border Report his district has lost access to $13 million due to the freeze.
“Across San Diego County, it’s $50 million, across the state of California, it’s a billion, and across the nation it’s $7 billion, these are significant funds that are necessary to provide support for students that are, in our opinion, being illegally held up right now by Trump Administration.”
According to Barrera, the money will help fund many district programs.
“The funds that are being withheld right now are funds to support after school programming, summer programming, support for students learning English, support for training teachers, adult education these are really important programs that support a lot of students.”
For decades, California and other states have relied on this funding to carry out a broad range of programs and services, including educational programs for migrant children and English learners; programs that promote effective classroom instruction, improve school conditions and the use of technology in the classroom; community learning centers that offer students a broad range of opportunities for academic and extracurricular enrichment; and adult education and workforce development efforts.
Pursuant to federal statutory and regulatory requirements, each year the Department of Education makes around 25 percent of the funds for these programs available to states on or about July 1 in order to permit state and local educational agencies to plan their budgets for the academic year ahead.
Without the money on hand, Barrera says San Diego Unified will try to make up the difference for as long as it can.
“Eventually that money is going to run out and that’s going to result in program cuts,” he said. “A lot of districts here in San Diego, across the state and the country, the smaller districts, they don’t have the ability to move money like that, so it means there are districts right now, that are having to think about making cuts right as the school year is about to begin.”
Politics and the need to discriminate against certain students is behind the Trump administration withholding the money, according to Barrera.
“Their priorities are about picking on immigrant students, picking on LBGTQ students, everybody they don’t like that they want to bully, they want to threaten states and school districts by saying if you don’t discriminate some of your students then we’re going to hold up money for all your students.”
California’s legal action points out that Congress, not the executive branch, possesses the power of the purse, saying “the constitution does not afford the executive Branch power to unilaterally refuse to spend appropriations that were passed by both houses of Congress and were signed into law.”
Barrera expects things to get resolved by October 1 with by the Trump administration releasing the money or the lawsuits taking hold in the courts.
The legal action involves blue and red states including some that supported Trump during the last presidential election.
Those states are Colorado, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.
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