One can reasonably argue that the federal government went overboard in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, spending more than was necessary, particularly after the worst of the once-in-a-century global crisis had been weathered.
But it is unfair and possibly illegal for the Trump administration to try to renege on these commitments that Congress authorized and a previous administration implemented, as it is doing with the announced suspension of pandemic relief for elementary and secondary schools.
Mississippi, according to the state Department of Education, is projected to lose $137 million in federal aid that was awarded by Congress but yet to be disbursed by the U.S. Department of Education.
If this decision holds, it’s going to create a financial bind for many local school districts, which have committed to remedial programs and construction projects based on the assurance that the cost would be reimbursed by the federal government for another year. The money, more than half of it allocated during Donald Trump’s four-year break from the White House, was designed to help school districts recover from the learning losses that occurred during the time that schools shut down and switched to remote learning as a way to protect their students and staff from the disease. Also, schools could use the money to improve the ventilation in school buildings to theoretically reduce the spread of the coronavirus and other airborne viruses.
Not all of this spending may have been the most rational: for example, putting money into new heating and air conditioning systems in dilapidated buildings that need to be replaced, but those were the parameters put on the spending by the folks in Washington.
Initially, school systems had until January 28 of this year to spend the balance of their allocation, but the Biden administration extended that deadline in Mississippi and the majority of states until March 30, 2026. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, who has been appointed with the directive of shaking up the education establishment, including shuttering the federal agency she now heads, has canceled that blanket extension. School districts could still get the extra time to spend the money, but they would have to go through the hassle of applying again for individual projects and demonstrate their worthiness.
That extra paperwork might be in keeping with the administration’s initiative to reduce wasteful spending, but it certainly runs counter to its other goal of greater government efficiency.
And it isn’t right. The states that were given the 14-month extension have been operating under that timetable and those rules. People have been hired and contracts have been signed based on the expectation that the federal government would stand by what it had previously agreed.
A change in administration should be irrelevant to honoring that commitment.
