The Trump Education Department Slashed DEI Spending — Tens of Millions Still Went to ‘Equity’ in 2025
The Trump administration has discontinued hundreds of millions in DEI-related education spending, but a new watchdog report alleges that the Department of Education still spent more than $60 million to advance “equity” in fiscal year 2025.
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Despite President Trump’s executive orders — such as “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” and “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” — the administration continues to fund DEI-themed projects through the Department of Education, according to a report by Open the Books, an advocacy group that promotes government transparency. Under President Trump, the Education Department awarded over $3.5 million to Northern Arizona University for the “Arizona Gear Up 2019-26: The Five E’s of Equity” program, and more than $100,000 to San Diego State University Foundation for “Project Oceanside: Optimizing The Capacity Of Special Educators For Inclusion Diversity, And Equity,” among other grants with similar DEI-related titles.
The department emphasized to National Review that it has reviewed grants for legal compliance and diverted funds away from those involving illegal discrimination.
“The Trump Administration is no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot — we are evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the Administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education,” said Press Secretary for Higher Education Ellen Keast. “Last year, ED reviewed over six thousand grants to evaluate if they were operationalizing unlawful DEI into educational programming — and moved almost $3 billion of funds away from those projects.”
A person familiar with the matter told National Review that some currently funded projects are misleadingly titled and include words such as “equity,” but the activities supported through the grants have been reviewed and “were not impermissible and did not operationalize illegal DEI policies.” The person also said that, in some instances, the Education Department has revised grant conditions to add compliance language regarding federal civil rights laws or has required recipients to adjust the project.
The — which examines fiscal years 2017 through 2025, with a focus on 2021 through 2025 — does identify a significant decrease in grant transactions that contained the key words “equity” or “social justice” since President Biden left office. Nearly $700 million has been spent on grants with DEI-related terminology since 2021, although such projects received only $62 million in funds in 2025. At least $40 million has been spent per year through DEI-related grants since 2017. Funding for DEI-labeled grants peaked in 2021, amounting to more than $160 million that year alone. The state given the most funding through the Department of Education’s DEI-themed grants from 2017 through 2025 was California, which received more than $150 million. It is followed by Indiana, Texas, Florida, Virginia, Arizona, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Connecticut, and Ohio.
Nearly half a million dollars was awarded to Ohio State University in 2022 for an initiative that aimed to add “at least 50 tenure-track faculty members whose research can help to address racial and social disparities.” More than $3 million was given to Framingham State University from 2022 through 2024 for the “Remixing Textbooks Through an Equity-Focused Lens” project, which has published open-source textbooks such as ‘Overweight’ Bodies, Real and Imagined. And almost $1 million was given to California State University for “pandemic recovery with equity” from 2022 through 2023.
Research abroad by American students that received financial support under the Biden administration included “Queering Genre — Transgressing Sonic Boundaries in Anime Music,” “Deconstructing the Warrior-Female Guerrilla Fighters Within the Colombian Conflict,” and “Interrupting Gender and Intersectional Microaggressions to Counter Gender-Based Violence at U. of the Witwatersrand.”
The Department of Education also slashed spending within weeks of Trump’s second inauguration. It cut $600 million in grants that were designed to “train teachers and education agencies on divisive ideologies,” in the words of the department. The training materials included topics like “social justice activism” and often described recruiting strategies focused on race.
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New spending on education under the second Trump administration includes a focus on civics education and the Semiquincentennial, such as the “American History and Seminars Discretionary Grant Program” and the “The America 250 Civics Education Coalition.”
Open the Book’s report also tracks the department’s overall spending and employment figures.
The Biden administration’s Department of Education spent roughly $560 million on salaries per year for 4,245 employees. In fiscal year 2025, just under $392 million was spent on 2,670 staff members — roughly a 30 percent decrease in spending and 36 percent decrease in staff.
The department has awarded more than one trillion dollars in grants since fiscal year 2017. Roughly $75 billion was spent in grants and other forms of financial assistance from 2017 through 2019, but those figures skyrocketed to $107 billion in 2020 and $310 billion in 2021 because of Covid-era relief plans.
However, the report found an increase in overall spending from 2024 to 2025: New Pell Grant spending was worked into the FAFSA Simplification Act of 2021, raising the department’s annual spending from $92 billion to $96 billion.
Upwards of $75.2 billion was spent through the “Higher Education Emergency Relief” program during the pandemic — but 16 of the top-20 richest colleges received funds. The University of Pennsylvania received more than $40 billion through the “emergency relief” program, despite having an endowment of at least $18 billion in 2021. Other institutions that received “emergency” funds include Yale, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Duke, the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, and Cornell.
From 2017 through 2025, the Department of Education spent around $2.5 billion a year on contracts, about half of which are related to student-loan-servicing.
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