A federal judge in Massachusetts on Friday blocked the Trump administration from collecting seven years of race-based admissions data from public colleges and universities in 17 states. U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor granted a preliminary injunction to a coalition of Democratic-led states, ruling that the Department of Education's data collection process violated the Administrative Procedure Act.
But buried in the ruling is a detail that matters far more than the injunction itself: Judge Saylor found that the Department of Education likely has the authority to collect, analyze, and make use of the data. The problem, in his view, was not the goal. It was the timeline.
The distinction is critical. The judge did not say the administration lacks the power to find out whether universities are still using race in admissions. According to The Hill, he said the National Center for Education Statistics moved too fast and skipped the usual notice-and-comment review process required under the Administrative Procedure Act.
In his ruling, Saylor was blunt about the process:
"The manner in which [National Center for Education Statistics] handled that process simply cannot be squared with the requirements of the [Administrative Procedure Act] — and, indeed, epitomizes arbitrary and capricious agency action."
He zeroed in on the 120-day deadline set by Trump's August executive order, which directed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "expand the scope of required reporting to provide adequate transparency into admissions." That order sought seven years of detailed admissions data to determine whether colleges were still weighing race after the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling against affirmative action.
Saylor's objection centered squarely on the clock:
"That deadline was not driven by any exigency, by the complexity of the subject matter, or the burden imposed on the institutions; it was set in response to a presidential directive."
In other words, the administration had the right idea and, according to this judge, likely the legal authority to back it up. What it didn't have was a process that checked every procedural box the APA demands. That is a fixable problem.
The 17 Democratic-led states that sued to block the data collection argued that the administration overstepped its authority and that compliance would be too costly and burdensome. The plaintiffs also claimed the data could be used to "unfairly target universities."
Think about what that argument actually concedes. If universities have nothing to hide, if they genuinely stopped considering race in admissions after the Supreme Court told them to, then seven years of data would confirm that. Transparency would be their best defense. Instead, 17 state governments mobilized their attorneys general to make sure nobody could look at the numbers.
New York Attorney General Letitia James celebrated the ruling and offered this:
"Students should not have to live in fear that their personal data will be handed over to the federal government, just as schools should not have to scramble to produce years of sensitive information to satisfy an arbitrary and unlawful demand."
Students living "in fear" of data transparency. That is the framing. Don't fear that universities are ignoring a Supreme Court ruling. Do not fear that admissions offices are quietly maintaining a system that the highest court in the land struck down. Fear that someone might check.
Sean Robins, director of advocacy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, testified at a March 26 hearing that the real issue was institutional capacity, not resistance:
"The challenge is not a lack of willingness — it's that institutions are being asked to reconstruct datasets that, in many cases, were never collected in this format to begin with or no longer exist."
That testimony deserves scrutiny. Universities collect staggering amounts of data on their applicants and students. They track demographics for accreditation, for federal funding compliance, for their own internal diversity reports, and for the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, which already gathers information on enrollment, graduation rates, tuition, and finances. The idea that these same institutions cannot produce admissions data broken down by race strains belief. They have built entire administrative offices around demographic classification. Now they can't find the files.
The August executive order expanded on the existing IPEDS framework to bring admissions data into the same transparency regime that already covers enrollment and graduation. The administration wanted to know whether the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling actually changed anything on the ground. That is a reasonable question. It is, in fact, the obvious question.
The Supreme Court ruled that race-conscious admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause. That ruling means nothing if no one verifies compliance. And compliance is precisely what universities and their political allies seem determined to keep unverifiable.
Judge Saylor also noted that concerns over the data collection were "compounded" by the administration's broader push to reshape the Department of Education. Trump's May executive order directed McMahon to "take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return education authority to the states." The judge flagged this as additional context for the plaintiffs' anxiety, but it also reveals the tension at the heart of the opposition. These 17 states want federal education infrastructure to exist when it serves their purposes and to be declared overreaching when it doesn't.
They want a Department of Education that funds. They do not want one that audits.
This is a preliminary injunction, not a final ruling. The judge explicitly acknowledged that the administration likely possesses the legal authority to collect this data. The path forward is procedural: go through the notice-and-comment process the APA requires, set a timeline grounded in regulatory procedure rather than an executive order deadline, and come back with the same request wrapped in the right paperwork.
The underlying question remains unanswered, and 17 states just spent considerable legal resources making sure it stays that way. Are universities complying with the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action, or aren't they?
Nobody fighting this data collection seems eager to find out.