In just one year, the Trump administration has orchestrated a radical overhaul of education civil rights enforcement—unmaking decades of civil rights progress in the process. The Trump administration quickly unraveled the work of previous administrations while using the department’s enforcement authority to punish schools and colleges that refused to comply with the administration’s far-right agenda. These tactics have no precedent in the agency’s nearly 60-year history.
In this post, I summarize how the Trump administration has transformed OCR into a discriminatory doppelganger of the civil rights agency it once was.
Trump’s OCR has prioritized a stunningly narrow set of issues
OCR is responsible for enforcing federal civil rights laws that prohibit schools and colleges that receive federal money from discriminating based on race, ethnicity, or shared ancestry (Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), sex (Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments), disability status (Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990), and age (Age Discrimination Act of 1975).
Prior to 2025, OCR’s enforcement work covered a wide range of issues across each of those areas. For example, OCR routinely investigated complaints that schools or colleges were unlawfully denying accommodations for students with disabilities, along with complaints of discriminatory student discipline and school assignment policies, as well as claims of sexual harassment. OCR was also responsive to emerging civil rights concerns. This was the case in 2023 when OCR pursued dozens of discrimination cases over concerns of harassment based on shared ancestry in response to complaints of antisemitism and Islamophobia following campus conflicts over Israel and Gaza. This breadth of work reflects OCR’s legal obligations to respond to complaints it receives (more than 20,000 annually in the last few years), as well as long-held institutional norms to serve as a “neutral fact-finder” in its enforcement work.
In contrast, the current administration has refocused the agency’s limited resources almost exclusively on three issues:
Of course, these issues are complicated, and some of OCR’s recent pursuits are at least adjacent to genuinely concerning civil rights issues (e.g., a rise in antisemitism following campus conflicts over Gaza). However, OCR has shown little inclination to conduct the types of nuanced investigations necessary to weigh, for example, free speech considerations against claims of antisemitism.
The narrow range of OCR’s work over the past year is highlighted in Figures 1 and 2. Figure 1 shows the concentration of civil rights enforcement in postsecondary institutions and on Title VI and Title IX issues. This is especially notable in K-12, where, typically, disability-related investigations make up most of OCR’s K-12 work.
Figure 2 illustrates the extraordinarily narrow focus of the Title IX and Title VI investigations opened in 2025. OCR’s only Title IX enforcement work was to challenge transgender student policies. OCR’s Title VI investigations were similarly concentrated across a handful of issues. Most Title VI cases focused on antisemitism, with the remainder taking aim at equity-oriented initiatives (e.g., DEI programs). This includes 45 cases against colleges that had a partnership with the PhD Project—a nonprofit organization that worked to support racially minoritized people in pursuing graduate studies in business. In K-12, most Title VI cases aimed to challenge local efforts to promote racial equity (e.g., Chicago Public Schools’ Black Student Success Plan).
Note that OCR did not pursue a single Title IX case that focused on sexual harassment or assault unrelated to transgender student policies, nor a single Title VI case involving racial discrimination against Black students.
However, the focus on Title VI, and specifically antisemitism, at the higher education level does not mean that colleges and universities were exempt from enforcement related to transgender policies. On the contrary, the Trump administration used investigations into antisemitism as a vehicle to eliminate DEI initiatives and accommodations for transgender students. For example, in the settlement with Brown University—a case initiated for concerns of antisemitism—the Trump administration required changes to the university’s gender-inclusive policies. This dynamic was also evident in cases involving Northwestern University and UCLA.
Reduced capacity and an abdication of OCR’s obligations to students and families
The narrowing of OCR’s priorities was implemented against the backdrop of broader efforts to shrink the US Department of Education—efforts that disproportionately impacted OCR. Prior to 2025, OCR was already a small, under-resourced federal agency. In fact, the final budget request for ED submitted by the Biden administration requested increases to OCR’s budget and staffing level to accommodate OCR’s rapidly increasing caseload. Yet, in March 2025, about half of OCR’s staff received termination notices and 7 of its 12 regional offices were closed. These staffing changes had significant impacts on the agency’s capacity to fulfill its legal obligations. Some reports estimate that OCR lawyers saw their caseload quadruple overnight, and families and advocates working with OCR to seek relief from discriminatory school environments saw that enforcement work abruptly halted and indefinitely paused.
OCR is obligated to respond to the civil rights complaints it receives, and nearly all investigations initiated by OCR prior to 2025 came in response to complaints filed by families and/or advocates. Over the last year, OCR has prioritized more proactive, administration-directed investigations, as well as investigations into complaints filed by right-wing advocacy groups such as the America First Legal Foundation and Parents Defending Education. This means that OCR is directing resources to remedy alleged civil rights violations for which there is no identified complainant or harmed party. This was the case in Chicago Public Schools, where Parents Defending Education, a Virginia-based advocacy group, filed a complaint challenging the district’s Black Student Success Plan. (OCR’s complaint process does not require a connection to the targeted school or college, though OCR had long prioritized complaints from families directly harmed by an alleged civil rights violation.)
OCR’s unresponsiveness to new and existing complainants has been a key issue in lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. However, in January 2026, the new assistant secretary for civil rights, Kimberly Richey, rescinded the termination notices for all OCR staff to work through the significant case backlog OCR has amassed over the last year.
Flagrant disregard for legal precedent and due process
OCR’s recent actions rely on what appear to be faulty or untested legal theories of what constitutes illegal discrimination. And many of the legal challenges to the Trump administration’s enforcement of Title VI and Title IX hinge, in part, on the question of whether the Trump administration is applying inappropriate definitions of discrimination in its enforcement work. For example, in a lawsuit brought by two school districts in Northern Virginia that were targeted for gender-inclusive policies, the districts argued that complying with the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX would require the districts to violate the law:
“Nothing in the text of Title IX prohibits schools from allowing transgender students from accessing school facilities that align with their gender identity. To the contrary, several U.S. Courts of Appeals—including the Fourth Circuit—have held that Title IX requires schools to allow such access.”
A disregard for due process has become another common, unfortunate theme. OCR’s legal authority to withhold federal funding from schools and colleges, which applies to all sources of federal funding, is well established. This is an incredible power that, historically, OCR leaders did not take lightly. Nor were they able to wield that power quickly given legal safeguards designed to prevent OCR from abusing its power. To proceed with terminating an institution’s federal funding, OCR is required to follow a lengthy series of steps to ensure due process for targeted institutions. This includes: documenting evidence of any violations through an investigation; providing the institution with a summary of investigation findings and notices of pending funding termination; and giving the institution the option to voluntarily settle a case or challenge any noncompliance findings before an administrative judge.
Under this administration, OCR has shown little interest in due process. In the last year, we’ve seen the administration:
- Withhold or pause federal grants for “presumptive or potential” civil rights violations. This was the case with UCLA, Brown, Harvard, and Columbia, among other institutions.
- Cancel millions of dollars in magnet school grants in Fairfax and NYC DOE without giving the districts the required notice or time to respond.
- Conduct superficial investigations that appeared to seek evidence to support predetermined conclusions, as was the case with UCLA.
- Offer findings without any investigation at all, as was the case in Denver Public Schools.
Several lawsuits have challenged the administration’s disregard for the legal procedures required to withhold federal funding for civil rights violations. Harvard had its funding reinstated after a federal judge found that the administration acted unlawfully in terminating Harvard’s grant money. The lawsuits over Title IX enforcement involving the Northern Virginia districts, as well as a similar lawsuit filed by the NYC DOE, also argue that the administration failed to follow required legal procedures in its termination of grant funding.
An unprecedented willingness to financially harm public schools and colleges
Until 2025, OCR was not in the business of withholding federal funds. In fact, OCR has not withheld federal funding from schools with any regularity since the late 1960s, when OCR held Title I funds from school districts that refused to make progress towards desegregation.
OCR’s hesitancy to enact financial penalties reflects long-held beliefs—beliefs that cross partisan lines—that withholding federal funding is counterproductive to ensuring equal educational access. That’s because withholding federal funding from an institution may further harm the students experiencing discrimination by decreasing an institution’s capacity to enact change. For decades, OCR’s approach to civil rights enforcement reflected that view. Funding termination was always treated as an option of last resort—something to be pursued only after all paths to a productive resolution were explored.
The last year has demonstrated the precarious nature of federal civil rights enforcement in education—and the dangers of putting these tools in the hands of leaders who show disregard for democratic norms and the rule of law.
OCR’s database of pending investigations has not been updated since the Trump administration took office in January 2025. To create a list of universities and schools under investigation by the US Department of Education, we relied on a dataset created by the Hechinger Report (as of December 3, 2025). We supplemented these data with additional information collected through Google News queries, as well as information gleaned from a review of department press releases on ongoing civil rights investigations.
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