Sitting before lawmakers on Thursday for her confirmation hearing, the presumptive Secretary of Education Linda McMahon repeatedly assured them the U.S. Department of Education would enforce federal law, using the agency’s office for civil rights to pursue cases alleging antisemitism or sexual harassment at the nation’s K-12 schools and college campuses.
“We will make sure the law is enforced,” she told Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., when he asked how the department would uphold Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination at federally funded schools.
But at the same hearing, McMahon also repeatedly discussed dismantling the Education Department, and suggested that the office for civil rights shift to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The hearing illustrated how the office for civil rights is caught in a contradiction in the first weeks of Trump’s second term.
The division that’s charged with enforcing the nation’s anti-discrimination laws at schools is subject to the Trump administration’s efforts to downsize and all but squash the department’s work. Since Trump took office, at least 120 Department of Education employees have been terminated or placed on administrative leave, and more than a dozen of those workers came from the office for civil rights.
Staff who remain in the office have been told to stop virtually all their work, ceasing the external communications core to their investigations into potential violations of civil rights laws.
Yet at the same time, the office is key to carrying out the administration’s policy objectives. Political appointees have already opened a slew of new cases, acting as the hammer to Trump’s barrage of executive orders that threaten to pull federal dollars if schools teach what he considers to be “radical indoctrination” or allow transgender girls to play on girls’ sports teams.
The staffing squeeze, work pause, and shift in enforcement priorities represent a seismic shift for a federal office that deals directly with schools to make sure they’re upholding students’ civil rights—and whose work has, until now, been relatively consistent regardless of who’s in the White House. Education watchers are worried about the implications, concerned that districts lack clarity on how they should follow civil rights laws and that students’ rights will be violated.
“Each of those people placed on leave presumably are in charge of dozens and dozens of investigations, pending complaints,” said Robert Kim, the executive director of the Education Law Center, a nonprofit that advocates for students’ rights. “So there’s already been a dramatic impact on the functioning of the office as a result of agency decisions or actions coming out of the White House over the last couple of weeks.”
Asked for details on the office for civil rights’ operations in recent weeks, Education Department spokesperson Julie Hartman responded, “Yes, the Office of Civil Rights is most certainly still in business. Please see our recent investigations and initiatives,” and listed recent department press releases announcing new OCR investigations and the rescission of Biden administration guidance on colleges’ payments to student-athletes.
Downsizing of staff and restrictions on investigations bring OCR’s work to a halt
The office for civil rights resolved 16,005 complaints and received 22,687 in 2024, according to data released by the department. The number of new complaints represented an 18 percent increase over the previous fiscal year, when it received 19,201 complaints, a record at the time, according to the office’s latest annual report.
The cases run the gamut, stemming from claims of race discrimination, sex discrimination, harassment, failure to provide free appropriate public education for students in special education, and retaliation.
Cases come to OCR often after students and their families have exhausted other options to resolve discrimination claims within their districts or at the state level. OCR has the ability to strip federal funds from districts that don’t comply with civil rights laws, but typically it instead pursues resolution agreements with school districts and colleges.
Arne Duncan, who served as education secretary under President Barack Obama, still thinks about a case that came to OCR during his tenure: A girl was raped at school, then suspended for lewd behavior.
“For me, it always felt like it’s the court of last resort and people who have just been traumatized and been re-traumatized by their district or by the state just looking for some sense of justice,” he said. “It just breaks your heart. The cases don’t go away. The need doesn’t go away.”
The office, he said, was always overworked, and always looking for more attorneys to address the need. It was a priority of Catherine Lhamon, who led the office during the Obama and Biden administrations, to hire more attorneys, and former President Joe Biden proposed expanding the office’s budget in his last budget proposal before leaving office, as OCR received a surge of complaints alleging antisemitism and Islamophobia at schools and colleges.
Now, Duncan fears what cases won’t be addressed—and he’s concerned about those that will.
Since Trump took office last month, the work to resolve open cases has ground to a halt, according to staff who spoke with Education Week. Mediations have been canceled. Investigators have been barred from speaking with anyone outside of the agency, making it nearly impossible to do investigations that require interviews with people making claims of discrimination and those they claim violated the law.
“It is terrible for anyone that came here substantively for the mission of OCR,” one staff member said. “It feels like we’re doing the exact opposite of what the mission is on paper.”
With the efforts to downsize, and with DOGE probing personnel files and department spending, employees have been terrified, another staff member said.
“Everybody’s just so unsettled,” the employee said. “That takes away from the work, too.”
The shakeup feels unprecedented even by the standard of a change in administrations, staff said. Staff who served during the first Trump administration don’t recall such efforts to completely disrupt the office’s functions in 2017, at the start of the president’s first term.
But that doesn’t mean the office isn’t entirely inactive. It has announced a series of cases that aim to be muscle to Trump’s executive orders.
JD Hsin, an assistant professor of law for the University of Alabama who previously worked in OCR, said he was surprised by how “decisively” the office has moved since the administration has come in, taking “a few very bold actions.”
Those actions openly align with Trump’s political priorities, and represent a 180-degree turn from the Biden administration’s enforcement concerns.
The office swiftly dismissed nearly a dozen complaints involving district book challenges, and rescinded previous guidance that said a district’s removal of books may violate civil rights laws. It terminated a “book ban coordinator” position the Biden administration created in June 2023, after school boards and state legislatures became the sites of debate over which books classrooms and school libraries should keep on their shelves.
About a week after Trump’s inauguration, the Education Department announced it had opened an investigation into Denver schools for opening an all-gender restroom at a high school, suggesting it could be a Title IX violation.
And since Trump signed an executive order barring transgender girls from competing on girls’ sports teams—and threatening federal funding to schools that violate it—the department has announced investigations into colleges and school athletic associations for potential violations of Title IX.
OCR’s statements about new investigations prompt concerns
OCR employees have learned of these investigations alongside the public, some told Education Week. And the announcements are atypical, current and former OCR employees said.
“The job of the office for civil rights is to be a neutral arbiter of the application of the law to facts, and identifying the opening of a case means nothing more than that,” said Lhamon, the Obama- and Biden-era OCR leader. “So it is deeply concerning to me that the office has been issuing press releases, because I think they don’t suggest that the office is neutral, and they do indicate a conclusion before an investigation takes place.”
It’s within the office’s authority to open its own investigations—those probes are known as directed investigations—rather than in response to submitted complaints. Prior administrations, such as under Biden and Obama, have not used this tactic as much as the Trump administration appears to be gearing up to do. It forecasts an aggressive push to use the department to carry out his social policy vision.
“This could be the start of a new push to use the directed investigation way of pursuing the agenda for the administration,” Hsin said.
Legal experts fear the downstream effects on schools
For an office that has frequent, direct engagement with schools over matters of discrimination—often developing detailed guidance on how schools should follow civil rights laws—employees at OCR feared there was uncertainty for schools and staff about what could prompt an investigation.
Legally, with the Trump administration making massive policy changes in some areas—such as reverting to old Title IX regulations from Trump’s first term, and threatening eventually to pull funds from schools that don’t comply with his orders on “radical indoctrination"; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and transgender athletes—there will likely be a lot of confusion, according to the experts who spoke with Education Week.
At her hearing, McMahon declined to interpret how one of Trump’s executive orders on “radical indoctrination” could affect the teaching of Black history, which one senator called “chilling,” saying it would send educators scrambling.
“We don’t want schools preemptively or prematurely taking steps to comply with Trump actions that are inconsistent with underlying law and constitutional principles or statutory principles,” said Kim, from the Education Law Center. “I think that that’s my worry—that there will be premature compliance before that compliance has been deemed necessary.”
Already, the administration has forcefully prodded naysayers.
California’s interscholastic athletic federation pushed back on the Trump administration’s crackdown on transgender athletes, telling school districts they must still comply with state nondiscrimination law rather than Trump’s order. In response, the office for civil rights promptly started an investigation, saying the athletic organization is “free to engage in all the meaningless virtue-signaling that they want, but at the end of the day they must abide by federal law.”
“I would remind these organizations that history does not look kindly on entities and states that actively opposed the enforcement of federal civil rights laws that protect women and girls from discrimination and harassment,” Trainor, the OCR head, said in a statement announcing the investigation into the California federation and a Minnesota athletic association.
Though state law doesn’t trump federal law, there will be questions about the validity of the Trump administration’s legal interpretation, Hsin said, probably leading to a U.S. Supreme Court case.
But as the work of OCR stalls, and in the absence of clear communication to schools on what the office intends to do, Lhamon fears problems will arise.
“Every day, educators are making decisions about the right and wrong way to apply the law to the facts in front of them, and it is dangerous for them not to have information about how the federal government believes them best to be complying,” Lhamon said. “Every moment that questions are unanswered leaves kids vulnerable to discrimination.”
