In the spring of 2025, a local controversy in Long Island’s Massapequa School District erupted into a national flashpoint, drawing in President Donald Trump and sparking a fierce debate over the limits of federal power in America’s schools. The dispute began when Massapequa refused to abandon its “Chiefs” mascot, in defiance of a New York State policy that prohibits public schools from using Native American imagery without the express permission of local tribes. The state’s rule, intended to curb the perpetuation of stereotypes, was met with resistance from the district, which saw its legal challenge falter in the courts. With options dwindling, Massapequa turned to the Trump administration for help.
President Trump, who had returned to office in January 2025 on a promise to “move education back to the states” and even eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, took a personal interest in the matter. According to Education Week, Trump weighed in on social media, and the Department of Education—rather than investigating the district—launched a civil rights probe into the New York State Education Department itself. In a striking reversal of the department’s usual role, federal officials concluded within a month that New York’s mascot policy violated a six-decade-old civil rights law designed to protect racial minorities, ordering the state to amend its policy or risk losing federal education funds and facing possible legal action.
The move was emblematic of a broader, paradoxical trend in Trump’s second term: while loudly advocating for a diminished federal footprint in education, his administration has become more deeply entangled in local and state school affairs than ever before. The administration’s interventions have not stopped at the Massapequa dispute. Investigations have been launched into other districts, state education agencies, and athletic associations, all with the goal of barring transgender girls from girls’ sports. The White House has also tried to compel every state and district to sign certifications disavowing what it calls “illegal DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. In a particularly dramatic move, nearly $7 billion in federal funding was withheld from schools over the summer of 2025 in an effort to root out what the administration described as a “radical, left-wing agenda.” Dozens of education grants have been abruptly terminated, often for allegedly advancing DEI goals.
These aggressive tactics have left local and state education leaders—many of whom may have expected less federal interference from Trump—scrambling to adapt. The possibility of sudden investigations, terminated grants, or frozen funds has forced districts to keep the federal government at the forefront of decision-making. As Jonathan Collins, professor and co-director of the politics and education program at Columbia University’s Teachers College, observed in Education Week, “We have this moment where federal intervention in education arguably hasn’t been higher, and it has absolutely nothing to do with legislation, and it’s not grounded in some sort of major, critical court case like we saw with Brown v. Board.”
At the heart of the Massapequa controversy is a deeper, unresolved debate about the federal government’s role in public education. For generations, education has been considered primarily a state and local responsibility—a principle enshrined in the very law that created the U.S. Department of Education in 1979. Yet, as Laura Schifter, a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and senior fellow with the Aspen Institute, noted, the federal role has always ebbed and flowed. “Over the past century-plus, a ‘push-pull mechanism’ involving the three branches of government and the states has led to a major expansion of the federal role in education, followed by actions from those same players to contain it.” The early months of Trump’s second term have seen this tug-of-war intensify, with unilateral federal actions often countered by state resistance, court rulings, and even congressional pushback.
The Trump administration’s rationale for its intervention in Massapequa has drawn sharp criticism from Indigenous voices. U.S. Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon has argued that New York “disrespected the people of Massapequa” by banning Native American mascots in public schools. But for many Native Americans, the “Chiefs” nickname and logo are not a celebration of their heritage but an insult. As a Haudenosaunee woman from the Onondaga Nation wrote in Newsday, “The Massapequa School District’s Chiefs nickname and logo doesn’t honor my culture, it insults it. I don’t see tradition in the logo – I see caricatures rooted in harmful stereotypes.” She continued, “We are not the mockeries that these ‘mascots’ represent. We are real people with real cultures that are still very much alive.”
New York State Education Department officials have echoed these concerns, stating that the ban was enacted because such mascots teach “stereotypical, misleading and too often, insulting images of American Indians.” Yet, Secretary McMahon has referred the issue to the Justice Department, urging prosecutors to pull funding from New York by interpreting civil rights law to claim the ban unlawfully suppresses mascots and logos “celebrating Native American history.” This argument, critics say, twists Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—a law designed to shield marginalized communities from discrimination—into a tool for protecting expressions that perpetuate harmful stereotypes.
The administration’s approach has not been limited to Massapequa. In July, McMahon launched a probe into Long Island’s Connetquot Central School District after it agreed to change its mascot to comply with the state’s ban. The Justice Department has also been drawn into similar disputes in California and Maine, where the Education Department has sued over transgender-athlete policies. More than 50 lawsuits have already been filed against Trump’s education policies, often slowing or halting his agenda.
The financial stakes are especially high for schools serving Indigenous students. As the Onondaga Nation woman pointed out, schools like the Onondaga Nation School near Syracuse face unique funding challenges. Unlike most public schools in New York, Indigenous nation schools do not benefit from the same state funding formulas for capital improvements. Instead, they must petition the State Education Department directly for building repairs and upgrades—a process that has left facilities in disrepair for years. The threat of federal funding cuts only deepens these challenges, potentially forcing the state to make up shortfalls and further straining resources for Indigenous students.
The federal government’s leverage in education comes largely from its control over funding, which accounts for 8% to 10% of public K-12 education spending nationwide. As Paul Hill, founder of the Center for Reinventing Public Education, explained, “Anybody that gives a grant becomes tempted to use the leverage implicit in it for whatever purposes they now have, and elections matter.” This leverage has historically been used to promote equal access and protect student rights, but the Trump administration has wielded it to impose new conditions—targeting DEI initiatives and transgender participation in sports—despite its rhetoric about returning power to the states.
Congress has begun to push back. In late July 2025, the Senate appropriations committee voted decisively against Trump’s proposed education budget cuts and efforts to shrink the Education Department, signaling bipartisan resistance to the administration’s agenda. Still, the future of federal involvement in education remains uncertain. Courts, Congress, and the states continue to respond in unpredictable ways, and the ultimate outcome may not be clear for years.
For now, the Massapequa mascot fight encapsulates a broader struggle over who gets to define the values and priorities of America’s schools. The answer, it seems, is still very much up for grabs.
