Donald Trump made frequent promises during his 2024 presidential campaign to cut education funding to schools whose instruction did not align with his views of race and gender.
Now that he has won the election, some advocates are gearing up to push back on those efforts, which they say could have a chilling effect on Minnesota schools.
“On Day 1, I will sign a new executive order to cut federal funding. We are going to cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content onto the shoulders of our children,” Trump said in a July rally in St. Cloud, as the crowd behind him roared in approval.
St. Cloud wasn’t the only place Trump made that promise. The Washington Post identified 82 times that Trump promised to cut funding to schools teaching “critical race theory” or “transgender insanity” — making it his most repeated campaign promise for his first day in office.
So what does that promise mean for Minnesota K-12 schools? In recent years, Minnesota has taken strides to include ethnic studies in school curriculum, which advocates say will teach more robust histories of different racial and ethnic groups, though some conservative critics have lambasted the field as “critical race theory.” Minnesota law also protects transgender students, including explicit rights for trans students to use locker rooms and bathrooms that align with their gender identity.
Minnesota schools have stronger protection than many other states from federal interference on these issues, experts told Sahan Journal.
But even empty threats from the Trump administration to cut off federal funding could have a chilling effect on schools and teachers.
“I worry about self-censorship among teachers and educators concerned about threats of enforcement, even though those threats are very unlikely to ever materialize because they’re not well-grounded in civil rights law and regulations,” said Rachel Perera, a fellow in governance studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution.
Kat Rohn, executive director of OutFront Minnesota, the state’s largest LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, advised school districts to “not overcomply.”
“The heart of the dangerous rhetoric that’s being used here in large part, I think, is an attempt to scare schools and educators away from doing what is best and what is right for students in their districts,” Rohn said.
Christy Hall, senior staff attorney at St. Paul-based advocacy organization Gender Justice, agreed.
“Don’t assume that just because somebody tweets, you’re going to get your federal funding removed, that you have to immediately change your policies, or somebody’s going to come in the next day and remove federal funding,” she said. “There are enforcement mechanisms that the federal government must follow before it can do that.”
Experts who spoke with Sahan Journal expected Trump to remove federal protections for transgender students, though they said those students would likely still be protected under Minnesota law.
They also said he could use the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to investigate race and gender complaints, though they said changing the definition of discrimination on the basis of race or sex is not as straightforward as Trump indicates. On other issues, like school curriculum, presidential authority is less clear.
Still, Trump may try to circumvent typical processes and use the power of the bully pulpit to enforce compliance with his vision, whether or not he has a legal pathway to do so. And an increasingly conservative federal judiciary means it’s not easy to predict how courts might rule on any unprecedented executive actions that come before them.
Here’s what Minnesota school districts need to know.
How can a president cut off funds to schools?
A presidential administration has two primary mechanisms for cutting off federal funding to schools: through Congressional action and through enforcement of civil rights laws.
Perera, of the Brookings Institution, said that schools are largely a product of state and local government, and that federal funding has historically been presidents’ primary tool to advance their education policy agendas. She pointed to school desegregation, educational access for students with disabilities, and standardized testing under No Child Left Behind. In those instances, laws passed by Congress specified circumstances under which the government could cut off funding.
For example, last summer the U.S. Department of Education warned Minnesota that its special education teacher licensure system did not meet federal requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. If Minnesota failed to address this issue, the federal government warned, the state could lose more than $200 million annually. Ultimately, the state developed a plan to tweak the licensure system, which the U.S. Department of Education approved; Minnesota did not lose any federal funds.
“Those formulas are written into law,” Perera said. “They can’t be changed through the power of the executive.”
Trump will have Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress as he begins his second term. Still, Perera sees an uphill battle for additional conditions on education funding.
“To pass new legislation, they would need 60 votes in the Senate, which they won’t have, or they would need to get rid of the filibuster,” she said. “They can’t do that with a simple majority. They cannot do that with the budget reconciliation process.”
A president also cannot cut off federal funds to schools via executive order.
“If Trump were to issue an executive order on Day 1 that says any state that teaches X, Y and Z no longer gets federal funding, I would imagine that states like Minnesota would sue the federal government,” said Liliana Zaragoza, associate professor and director of the Racial Justice Law Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Could Trump revoke federal funds using civil rights enforcement?
Another presidential mechanism for revoking school funding is civil rights enforcement. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigates complaints of discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability. The Office of Civil Rights can revoke funding as the result of an investigation, after a long process.
Trump has said he would use civil rights enforcement to impose consequences on schools and teachers that do not comply with his agenda.
“My Department of Education will inform states and school districts that if any teacher or school official suggests to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body, they will be faced with severe consequences, including potential civil rights violations for sex discrimination, and the elimination of federal funding,” he said in a February 2023 video.
School districts typically have many opportunities to address the federal government’s grievances before losing funding. For example, in August, Minneapolis Public Schools reached an agreement with the Office of Civil Rights stemming from a 2022 complaint over unequal treatment of girls’ sports under Title IX, which bans sex discrimination in schools. The district agreed to appoint a Title IX athletics compliance coordinator and develop a plan to provide equal athletics accommodations for male and female students.
During President Joe Biden’s administration, the Office of Civil Rights has reached nine agreements with school districts or universities in Minnesota. Five of these agreements focused on discrimination on the basis of disability, three centered on sex-based discrimination, and one agreement addressed racial discrimination.
This investigation process is “reactive,” Perera said. Although the Office of Civil Rights is “severely underfunded,” it is required to investigate every complaint that it receives. That means its ability to proactively find violations of civil rights law is limited.
In order for Trump to use Office of Civil Rights enforcement to target schools’ diversity practices or transgender students, he would have to change the definitions of race- and sex-based discrimination. He would first issue “non-binding guidance,” said Hall, at Gender Justice. Changing regulations in a legally binding way would entail a lengthy process that involves a public notice and comment period and a review from the Office of Management and Budget, she said.
“I don’t see a real risk that that’s happening on Day 1,” Hall said.
Perera shared a similar analysis. “I think they will leverage non-binding guidance to try to intimidate schools and try to get schools to comply without the need for enforcement,” she said.
Indeed, it’s rare for the federal government to actually revoke school funding.
A U.S. Department of Education spokesperson told Sahan Journal that the agency’s Office of Civil Rights last terminated federal funds to a school district over a Title IX violation in 1992. That decision, revoking funding to the Capistrano Unified School District in California, went through a lengthy review process and was ultimately ordered by an administrative law judge. Nearly eight years passed between the initial complaint to the Office of Civil Rights and the final approval of the judicial order revoking federal funds.
Could Trump use these tools to get rid of ethnic studies?
Minnesota’s revised social studies standards, which include ethnic studies, go into effect in the 2026-2027 school year. A separate law also goes into effect that year which will require all Minnesota high schools to offer a standalone ethnic studies course.
Some school districts, including Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Rochester, already offer ethnic studies courses. Students who advocated for these standards have told Sahan Journal these classes helped them learn about their own cultural histories and their classmates’ backgrounds, and have helped them feel more engaged at school.
But as Minnesota debated updates to the state social studies standards, some conservative critics described the proposed ethnic studies rules as “critical race theory,” a legal academic concept for analyzing systemic racism. And Trump has repeatedly said he would revoke funding for schools teaching “critical race theory.”
The Trump administration could investigate the way schools teach about race and gender. But experts say that curriculum is the purview of state and local governments.
“The federal government has no business in curricular decisions at the local level, even when it comes to federal civil rights enforcement,” Perera said. “Historically, leadership at the Department of Education has been very explicit that we do not touch curriculum.”
Catherine Ahlin-Halverson, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, said she expected Trump to try to challenge curricular standards, but thought Minnesota’s laws would stand up in court. “We can expect the federal government to attempt to weaponize their power against these kinds of curriculum guidelines,” she said. “I hope they should be upheld and embraced here in Minnesota under our state education laws and our Human Rights Act and our constitution.”
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Catrin Wigfall, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment, a conservative think tank that advocated against Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards, said she expected curriculum control to remain local.
“With voters saying ‘no thanks’ to a Harris-Walz administration, ethnic studies will likely remain where it has been — at the state level versus a focus at the federal level,” Wigfall said in an email. “Unfortunately, for Minnesota, this means continued statewide focus on a critical/liberated version of ethnic studies that imposes a narrow ideology and polarizes students.”
Instead, she suggested, Trump could focus on school choice.
“Perhaps the incoming administration will pursue a tax-credit scholarship option that would finally help Minnesota students stuck in failing schools access better options,” Wigfall said. “That’s something that has not been a focus of the state that would have positive impacts on education.”
How might the Trump administration change protections for LGBTQ kids?
One threat that Trump has the clear legal ability to act on: rolling back protections for transgender students.
“One thing that we expect the Trump administration to do is rescind regulations and interpretations of federal law that protect the LGBTQ+ community from discrimination,” said Ahlin-Halverson of the ACLU.
Biden’s Department of Education adopted a more expansive definition of Title IX, which includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity in the definition of sex discrimination. Under Biden’s Title IX rule, schools must call students by their preferred pronouns and allow them to use the bathrooms that align with their gender identity. Failing to do so could trigger an Office of Civil Rights investigation and ultimately cause them to lose funding. That rule went into effect in August, after undergoing the full regulatory process.
“Quite literally for states that lack specific state-based nondiscrimination protections, this is the difference between having any protections in an educational setting for LGBTQ students and none,” said Rohn of OutFront Minnesota.
But some states sued, saying that Biden had overstepped his authority to reinterpret a longstanding law. Federal courts blocked the new regulations from going into effect in 26 states. Hall, of Gender Justice, said she expects the Trump administration to agree to a nationwide stay on Biden’s new Title IX regulations, which would effectively void them for the whole country.
Another likely Trump target: transgender kids participating in sports.
Biden proposed new Title IX regulations over transgender students’ access to athletics, prohibiting state bans but allowing targeted restrictions. But he put off finalizing the rule until after the election. If Biden does not finalize his rule before leaving office, Hall said, Trump will be able to ride the coattails of Biden’s lengthy process, inserting his own rule as final — however different it may be from what Biden proposed and sought comment on.
The U.S. Department of Education said it had no updated information on whether or when this rule will be finalized.
In Minnesota, Hall does not foresee much impact from a return to Trump’s previous Title IX policy. Nor does Rohn.
“What we encourage folks to take heart in is that Minnesota’s Human Rights Act has protected LGBTQ students in educational spaces since 1993,” Rohn said. “Those protections remain solid. They remain in effect. They do not change.”
However, Rohn said, it’s possible that the Trump administration could try to enforce its interpretation of Title IX through litigation, in an attempt to force states with better LGBTQ protections to drop them. And it’s also possible that Minnesota school districts will find the change in federal guidance confusing. Some administrators may not understand their obligations under the Minnesota Human Rights Act, or prefer to ignore them.
And that confusion increases the chance for harm to students, said Ahlin-Halverson of the ACLU. If a school administrator mishandles a request to ban a book or remove a Pride flag from a wall, a student can be deeply harmed — even if the decision is later reversed.
The ACLU of Minnesota called on Governor Tim Walz to call a special legislative session while both chambers of the Legislature are still fully controlled by Democrats. Among their priorities: requiring schools to develop a gender inclusion policy to codify protections for transgender and nonbinary students. Ahlin-Halverson also said she worries about attempts from the federal government to obtain school information about transgender and nonbinary students, and said she’d like to see stronger data privacy laws.
“While we can seek to enforce and protect those students through litigation, it does not prevent that initial harm that can be devastating,” Ahlin-Halverson said. “Being at the center of a war regarding your existence is devastating to a student, even if we ultimately are able to protect their rights in Minnesota through the court system.”
Minnesota laws stand
So how should schools approach the next Trump administration?
The most important thing to remember, Rohn said, is that Minnesota law should protect students — regardless of what happens at the federal level.
“Minnesota law is still the law and that we still have the expectations set out by the law in schools,” Rohn said. “As long as that holds, Minnesota families can be assured that we have strong and robust protections that will ensure that LGBTQ students and other folks receive fair and appropriate education here in this state. But we are concerned that that could be challenged by a really aggressive administration. And we hope that folks will step up and do the right thing, if that does come to pass.”
