Massachusetts’ congressional delegation said the Trump administration’s decision to “clawback” $106 million in COVID-19-era funding for K-12 schools is “harmful and incredibly frustrating to students, families, educators, and school district leaders.”

In a letter sent Thursday to the U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon, the state’s entire Congressional delegation and Gov. Maura Healey said they were “alarmed at this abrupt termination” of congressionally authorized and appropriated funding for education in the state.

Springfield is set to lose out on the most cash — more than $47 million — while Boston is losing $3.4 million, according to the Healey administration. The elected officials said the “about-face” on the continued availability of the money was an “insult.”

“Massachusetts gives students the best education in the country. We urge you to reverse course and allow leaders in the Commonwealth to deliver for students and communities without continued chaos and disruption,” the group said in the letter.

The Healey administration said it was notified last week that it was losing access to money set to flow to Massachusetts through a pandemic-era fund that the governor claimed the state had until March 2026 to utilize.

Healey previously said the money was going to be used to stand up mental health care and math tutoring for students, as well as increasing school security and installing systems to clean the air in school buildings.

In a statement earlier this week, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education said the COVID-19 pandemic is over and states and school districts “can no longer claim they are spending their emergency pandemic funds on ‘COVID relief’ when there are numerous documented examples of misuse.”

“The Biden administration established an irresponsible precedent by extending the deadline for spending the COVID money far beyond the intended purpose of the funds, and it is past time for the money to be returned to the people’s bank account,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said the agency would consider extensions on an individual, project-specific basis “where it can be demonstrated that funds are being used to directly mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on student learning.”

Healey and the Congressional delegation said the reversal on the cash affects 41 states and over $2 billion in funding.

The state’s congressional delegation said school districts and individual schools built their budgets based on the understanding they would have the money from the federal government.

“For example, the New Bedford school district allocated funds for a school-based health center. Some school districts were anticipating using the funding for mental health supports, security, air quality improvement, and math tutoring,” the lawmakers said in the letter.

The lawmakers said the withdrawal of the money “will force schools back to the drawing board, requiring them to fight these cuts, rework their budgets, and scale back or eliminate projects intended to help students, educators, and communities.”

Healey previously said Trump “suddenly ripped away more than $100 million in funding that is supposed to go right to Massachusetts students and schools.”

“At a time when students are still struggling to recover from the pandemic, we need to be doing everything we can to address learning loss and the youth mental health crisis,” she said in a statement earlier this week.

Originally Published: April 4, 2025 at 12:14 PM EDT