No, Trump and DeVos can’t withhold funding from schools whenever they want. Here’s what they can do.
While presidents can in some cases legally withhold funding appropriated by Congress, they can’t do it without notifying Congress and in some cases getting approval. (Some have tried and been struck down by courts, and DeVos has been held in contempt of court as education secretary for refusing to stop collecting loans from former students of a chain of for-profit colleges that closed.)
Trump and DeVos — who often talk about the importance of local control of education — also have no authority to force schools to open at a particular time or in a specific way.
Those are state and local decisions, however much Trump and DeVos shout about it. AASA, the School Superintendents Association, said in a statement directed at Trump: “You don’t support local decision making if it’s conditional on only making choices you support."
Trump raised the issue of reopening schools fully last week in a tweet in which he said that other countries had opened schools “with no problems." He named four European countries that had reopened schools but did not mention they had done so only after dramatically bringing down national coronavirus infection rates, which the United States has failed to do. And he ended the tweet with this: “May cut off funding if not open!”
DeVos herself made several calls CONTINUE READING: No, Trump can’t unilaterally withhold funds from schools - The Washington Post
