WASHINGTON — The Education Department has agreed not to enforce Biden-era rules in a federal grant program aimed at growing the number of underrepresented students obtaining doctoral degrees.
The guidelines for the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achievement Program had prompted a lawsuit from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), which the group has dropped after reaching a written agreement with the Trump administration.
“We knew that the Trump administration was gonna change their position, and so we wanted assurances that they were going to” apply it, WILL managing vice president and deputy counsel Dan Lennington told The Post.
“Now they are not enforcing the race-based rules,” he added. “But as far as the actual repeal of the rule, that is going to take place in the next few months. …They have committed to removing it.”
WILL assisted the conservative Young Americans for Freedom in advancing the lawsuit, which it formally withdrew on Tuesday ahead of a hearing by the St. Louis-based 8th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Two-thirds of the $60 million McNair program — named for NASA’s second black astronaut in space, who died in the 1986 explosion of the shuttle Challenger — is intended to be reserved for low-income, first-generation college students.
The rest of the money is set aside for groups that are “underrepresented” in graduate programs.
WILL expressed concerns that “underrepresented” applied to black, Hispanic, and Native American students, but not white or Asian students.
The right-leaning law firm began noticing in 2021 that the Biden administration was beefing up dozens of programs for “socially disadvantaged individuals” and began firing off lawsuits in response.
“We’ve been at this now for five full years, suing over these programs and having tremendous success,” Lennington reflected. “This is just sort of the cherry on the top.”
“The last thing to do is to get the Trump administration to do the work of formally removing the last vestiges of this race discrimination.”
Since President Trump was sworn in as the 47th president last year, his team has been working on scrapping race-based rules across the government.
Trump signed multiple executive orders to further that goal, including one on Jan. 21, 2025, to “restore merit-based opportunity.”
Both the Justice Department’s Division of Civil Rights and the Education Department have lodged several complaints accusing colleges and universities of perpetuating race-selective programs.
“Now we’re down and actually doing the hard work of removing these entrenched race-based programs, one at a time,” Lennington explained.
“We’re very, very happy with the Trump administration’s promise to follow the law and to provide equal opportunity for everybody.”
The Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
