Maine’s increasingly litigious Attorney General (AG) Aaron Frey signed on to yet another lawsuit against the federal government on Monday, this time targeting the Trump Administration’s cuts to mental health funding for schools.
“I cannot think of a more worthy priority than ensuring children receive mental health services they need. These funds were Congressionally designated, with bipartisan support, for this critical service in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy. Withholding these funds is not only cruel, it is illegal,” said Frey.
The lawsuit, filed with support from 16 state AGs, targets an April Department of Education (DOE) decision to discontinue $1 billion grant established in the wake of the 2022 Uvalde, Texas school shooting.
The funding was intended to bring 14,000 mental health professionals to schools across the country.
The DOE claimed when the grant was cancelled that it conflicted with the administration’s priorities to continue the grant, and argued that the funding has been used to implement race-based recruitment quotas rather than the mental health of children.
“Under the deeply flawed priorities of the Biden Administration, grant recipients used the funding to implement race-based actions like recruiting quotas in ways that have nothing to do with mental health and could hurt the very students the grants are supposed to help,” said DOE spokeswoman Madi Biedermann.
The grant reportedly included provisions to focus on hiring “diverse” mental health specialists. Frey notably failed to mention that aspect of the department’s decision to discontinue the grants, and framed it as a cruel and illegal decision that will simply harm children.
According to Frey, the Maine DOE will lose $3 million in grant funding used to employ 14 mental health professionals. In 2024, over 5,000 Maine students took advantage of services made possible by the grant, he said.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, asks for an injunction to cancel the grant’s discontinuation, and claims that the decision violates the Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act by rescinding federally authorized funds.
This is just the latest in a lengthy string of lawsuits filed by Frey or to which Maine’s attorney general has signed onto with his counterparts in other states against the Trump Administration, including suits against his cuts to Maine DOE funding, attempts to end birthright citizenship, and cuts to museum funding.
