Trump Moves to Strip American Bar Association of Its Power

President Trump is trying to take away the American Bar Association’s ability to accredit law schools for being too woke.

The ABA is the leading accreditor for almost 200 law schools in the U.S. Without its accreditation, a school’s graduates may not qualify to take the bar exam, and the school itself may not qualify for federal funding—two massive implications. Now the Education Department has published a 500-page report recommending the removal of that longstanding power because they believe the ABA is trying to “inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

“We have said many times that accreditation, in general, operates like a cartel,” assistant Secretary of Education David Barker said to The Wall Street Journal. “When there’s no competition, accreditors feel free to inject their own political preferences, their own ideologies into the work that they do.”

The Education Department’s recommendation is not final and will take some months to be adjudicated, but the right is already celebrating.

“This will be one of the most meaningful changes to open doors for Americans and steer legal culture toward justice, not radical indoctrination,” former Trump adviser May Mailmain wrote on X. “The American Bar Association (ABA) is a left-wing advocacy group, filing 80% of its amicus briefs for liberal arguments and 0% for conservative. It uses its monopoly on recognizing which law schools are ‘accredited’ (get student loans) to force DEI hiring, recruitment, and inflate the cost of education.”

The right has railed against both the ABA and higher education in general for some time now. The Trump administration has ratcheted up those attacks, going after law firms that won’t capitulate and freezing university funding on DEI grounds. Accreditation is just another tool in this culture war—he even called it his “secret weapon.” It’s also worth pondering why the most corrupt president in history would want to cripple the law school education apparatus.

The ABA continues to maintain that it is operating well within the Education Department’s requirements.

“ABA presidents have issued 15 separate statements dealing with judicial independence, security and the integrity of the justice system in the U.S. in the past eight years. That’s Democratic and Republican administrations. And it’s not who we’re opposed to, it’s what we’re in support of,” ABA President William R. Bay told NPR back in 2025 when asked about accusations of liberal bias. “If we want America to be great, we must do the right thing every day. And that’s why we support the rule of law, the bedrock principles of our democracy. And that’s what we’re speaking once again for the rule of law, because there’s a clear pattern we see that would suggest it is under considerable duress.”