Years ago, when Mike Rubin’s school was the subject of a U.S. Department of Education civil rights investigation, he found the investigators’ process to be thorough, consistent, and neutral. In fact, it ended up being helpful: He credits that experience—and the advice and counsel that came out of it—as part of the reason the school has had so few complaints.
“They allowed us to really look at our practices and procedures through a neutral lens of the law,” said Rubin, the principal of Uxbridge High School in Massachusetts.
That was at the tail end of President Donald Trump’s first administration. But Trump’s return to the White House in January has brought a new era of aggressively investigating schools for allegedly flouting the president’s priorities and orders to rid school sports of transgender athletes and eliminate school diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The Education Department has launched more than 80 probes into schools and universities, athletic associations, and state education departments to enforce his social policy agenda. And the president and others in his administration regularly wield the threat of federal funding cuts for those that don’t fall in line.
The administration has already cut off or frozen billions in grant funding at elite universities, including Columbia and Harvard, over their handling of antisemitism on campus. At the University of Pennsylvania, the Trump administration suspended $175 million over a transgender graduate’s participation in women’s swimming in 2021 and 2022.
At the K-12 level, schools in Maine are the closest to seeing something similar happen to them as the Trump administration repeatedly hammers the state over the participation of two transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
But it’s not just the Education Department’s office for civil rights that has acted as the hand carrying out Trump’s orders.
Other federal agencies’ civil rights offices have joined the fray, piling on investigations of entities that have publicly flouted Trump’s orders, with Maine and California bearing the brunt so far. The Education Department’s student privacy office, which is tasked with enforcing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, has also launched investigations into Maine and California aligned with Trump’s transgender student policies.
“At this point, it’s pretty commonplace with this administration. It’s very much in line with what we’ve come to expect, with the department using its investigatory authority in an aggressive and directed way toward recipients who are on their radar, who are in their sights,” said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney who previously served in the Education Department’s office for civil rights. “They’re coming for Maine and California from many different directions. This appears to be one more angle of that attack.”
The approach could represent a future without an Education Department if Trump succeeds in eliminating the department, with other agencies stepping up to fill the investigatory void. Until then, it shows the administration will use multiple levers to get what it wants—in a way the first Trump administration didn’t.
“It’s qualitatively different. It’s not just a question of degree,” said Jeff Henig, professor emeritus of political science and education at Teachers College of Columbia University. “This is picking up echoes of ideas that were floated and tentatively pursued during the first administration, and then supercharging them.”
Trump administration is using a show of force with Maine—and other states are watching
Maine has become a test case of the Trump administration’s ability to see through its threats.
The state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, told Trump at a February White House event that she would see him in court after he threatened to cut federal funding if the state didn’t follow his Feb. 5 executive order barring transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ sports.
Shortly after, three federal agencies—the departments of Agriculture, Education, and Health and Human Services—opened investigations into the state’s department of education, a school district with a transgender athlete, the association that oversee high school athletics in the state, and the University of Maine System, alleging they were violating Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination at federally funded schools.
USDA froze federal funding for the University of Maine System while it conducted its abbreviated probe—in which it didn’t find a violation—and later froze administrative funding for Maine’s school nutrition programs as it launched a review of all education and research funding to the state. That funding freeze circumvented what is typically a longer process to pause funding, drawing litigation from Maine’s attorney general that resulted in a judge forcing USDA to unfreeze the funds.
Meanwhile, the Education Department last week said it was beginning the process of terminating the state’s federal funds after Maine refused to comply with a list of demands. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced it was suing the state, seeking to halt Maine’s policies that allow trans athletes to play on girls’ teams and have transgender athletes’ titles “returned” to cisgender athletes.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said at a press conference to announce the Maine suit that the administration was also looking at retroactively pulling funds from the state “for not complying in the past.”
“We want to make sure that if you open women’s sports or intimate facilities to males, you expose yourself to federal civil rights investigations,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at the press conference with Bondi. “Gov. Mills will definitely get her wish.”
School districts are noticing the stepped-up enforcement
Districts are noticing the more proactive enforcement and closely following it, Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy for AASA, The School Superintendents Association.
“I think the significance of the administration’s decision to attempt to withhold all federal funding for a state is considerable, and other states I know are watching carefully as the Maine litigation specifically unfolds to see what will transpire and how the state will fare in this lawsuit,” said Pudelski.
It’s not commonplace for the Education Department to cut off federal funds from individual schools and universities—much less entire states—following a civil rights investigation, experts say. Usually, such investigations follow Rubin’s experience of a more constructive process that ultimately leads to a school coming into compliance with funding intact.
But Trump’s administration has taken a more punitive approach, experts have said. It has also moved at a rapid clip: Cases that would typically take months or years to resolve are moving to enforcement in a matter of weeks.
Plus, experts dispute the administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws to ban transgender athletes and DEI programming in schools.
Bondi, the attorney general, said the Trump administration had “exhausted” other avenues and “urged” Maine to comply with the executive order before suing.
“We don’t like standing up here and filing lawsuits. We want states to comply with us,” she said Wednesday. “That’s what this is about.”
Bondi has also written letters to officials in California and Minnesota warning them of potential litigation over transgender athletes.
More muscular enforcement comes as the Education Department shrinks
The involvement of other agencies comes as the Education Department’s staff dwindles. Before Trump took office, the Education Department’s OCR boasted a dozen regional offices and more than 560 employees. But after seismic cuts and buyout deals, the office has lost seven of its offices and nearly half its employees.
While it continues to open investigations on its own, the Education Department has also been involved in two taskforces to investigate antisemitism and Title IX cases that involve multiple federal agencies and multiple offices within the Education Department. McMahon told The 74 that the multi-agency effort “to some extent” makes up for cuts to OCR.
Other agencies’ civil rights offices have historically been leaner. USDA’s office had around 130 employees, and HHS’ had roughly 190, according to budget documents for fiscal year 2025.
Still, it’s not unheard of for HHS’ civil rights office to collaborate with its Education Department counterpart, said Roger Severino, who served as the director of the HHS office during Trump’s first administration. Severino led enforcement against Michigan State University in a Title IX case against sports doctor Larry Nassar, who was charged with sexually assaulting hundreds of young women and girls. The case also involved the Education Department.
“I’m proud to see my former office be first out of the gate in defending the privacy, safety, and well-being of women and girls,” Severino said in an email.
But the USDA’s involvement in Maine came as a surprise to some educators, Pudelski said.
“I think a lot of people didn’t realize that there were all these OCRs in every agency and that they could also use their enforcement power and with districts,” Pudelski said.
Rubin, the Massachusetts principal, said he’s confident his school follows the law, but it makes him nervous, broadly, that other offices might investigate and not understand the context of schools.
“The challenge that you run into is that the lawyers that may have come in from the office of civil rights from the Department of Education were looking at things very specifically with an education lens, whereas if you’re coming in as a lawyer from say, the Department of Treasury, your background and your context are very, very different,” Rubin said. “I guess you could say that the law is the law, but context matters.”
2025-04-16 21:14:30
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