CA joins lawsuit against Trump’s cutting school mental health services funding
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that it is illegally trying to terminate two federal grant programs that were created to mitigate student mental health concerns after the Parkland and Uvalde school shootings.
Bonta warns that if the grants were cut it would result in “immediate, devastating, and irreparable harm” and that educational agencies “will be forced to lay off the very same professionals that Congress intended to recruit, hire, and retain in rural and high-need school districts.”
He also noted that education and Medicaid expenditures would soar as states are forced to fill the funding gap and unmet student mental health needs the canceled grants would leave behind.
This is the second time that Bonta has joined a multi-state effort against the Trump administration concerning its efforts to cut funds to school social workers and in-school mental health services. The Department of Education tried to discontinue the same set of mental health grants in April 2025, claiming it was in the “best interest” of the federal government to reallocate the money to other priorities. That attempt was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The new lawsuit also states myriad ways in which the department has maneuvered around the Supreme Court’s decision, such as issuing grants subject to mid-year review and sending grantees notices informing them that their grants could be terminated with “wind-down instructions.”
This time around, the administration has again targeted the grant programs’ “discriminatory DEI” statutes, claiming they constitute civil rights violations and are grounds for immediate termination as opposed to discontinuation. The coalition of attorneys general alleges that the administration did not abide by the General Education Provisions Act, which requires parent agencies to seek voluntary compliance and provide a hearing before terminating a grant, steps the administration allegedly skipped.
“Though the precise mechanism by which the department plans to end the protected grants may have changed, its illegality has not,” said Bonta of the administration’s second attempt.
This story was originally published July 10, 2026 at 4:08 PM with the headline "CA joins lawsuit against Trump’s cutting school mental health services funding."
