California joined several other states Friday in suing the Trump administration over its demand that public schools eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives or risk losing federal funding — expanding its defiance in a standoff with high stakes for students across the state.
The lawsuit from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and other state attorneys general came one day after a Trump administration deadline for state officials to collect certifications from every school district in the nation confirming that all DEI efforts had been eliminated, on the argument that such DEI initiatives amount to illegal discrimination.
And it comes two weeks after the California Department of Education defended the legality of DEI efforts in a letter to school district superintendents. Bonta took a similar stance in announcing the lawsuit Friday.
“The U.S. Department of Education is unapologetically abandoning its mission to ensure equal access to education with its latest threat to wholesale terminate congressionally mandated federal education funding,” Bonta said in a statement.
“Let me be clear: The federal Department of Education is not trying to ‘combat’ discrimination with this latest order. Instead it is using our nation’s foundational civil rights law as a pretext to coerce states into abandoning efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion through lawful programs and policies.”
Bonta, whose office has now sued the current Trump administration 15 times, said President Trump had “once again … exceeded his authority under the Constitution and violated the law.”
Neither the White House nor the U.S. Department of Education immediately responded to a request for comment Friday.
Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the department, has previously said that “federal financial assistance is a privilege, not a right,” and that many schools have flouted their legal obligations to qualify for such funding in the past, “including by using DEI programs to discriminate against one group of Americans to favor another.”
The states are not the first to sue over the anti-DEI threat to school funding. Lawsuits filed by teachers unions and civil liberties groups also had some early success.
On Thursday, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked the administration’s directive that schools eliminate diversity programs in a lawsuit brought by the National Education Assn. and the American Civil Liberties Union. A second judge postponed other DEI-related education directives in a case brought by the American Federation of Teachers in Maryland.
It is not unusual for multiple different parties to sue over a single government policy, as different stakeholders hold different standing and positions on such matters, and their cases can fair differently as they rise through the courts.
In an interview with The Times on Friday, Bonta said the issue was one he felt was “ripe and appropriate” for his office to jump into and litigate for several reasons. First among them is that California has “billions of dollars of funding at stake.”
His office said $7.9 billion in federal funding due to California was at risk. The lawsuit put the threat to its multistate coalition at $13.9 billion overall.
Bonta also said he acted because the Trump administration’s directive to schools took a “perverted and distorted view” of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, “turning it on its head” by “saying that efforts to address discrimination are somehow discriminatory.”
The directive was also a prime example of a more broadly problematic and legally dubious pattern by the Trump administration of vaguely ordering an end to DEI initiatives across government despite failing to define what “DEI” means or why it merits concern, Bonta said.
“This waging of the cultural war, this attack on DEI without defining what it is, but just saying it’s bad and you can’t do it — and they want you to certify that you can’t — that is something that we wanted to be engaged in,” Bonta said. “And this is a good case to do it.”
The California Department of Education has repeatedly made similar arguments.
In a letter to school districts, county education offices and charter schools, Chief Deputy Supt. David Schapira wrote that there “is nothing in state or federal law … that outlaws the broad concepts of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘inclusion.’ ”
In a separate letter to the U.S. Department of Education, the CDE wrote that it was “unclear which specific programs or activities” the federal agency was targeting with the directive, as it mentioned “certain DEI practices” or “illegal DEI” but provided no definition of those things.
Joining Bonta in leading the lawsuit were the attorneys general of Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York. The attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin also joined.
