Part 164: Donald Trump vs. the Education Department – Government Efficiency and Civil Rights Failures

Published April 3, 2025.

Apr 04, 2025

Donald Trump speaks at a press conference with Linda McMahon, head of Small Business Administration, March 29, 2019 at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida (Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images).

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By Zachary Ellison, Independent Journalist

While the U.S. Department of Education may be on the chopping block for Donald Trump, the end of the actual department seems more uncertain than ever in 2025 despite directions to the contrary from Trump’s executive order to slash spending and specifically eliminate the department. New Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has slashed half its workforce, shutting offices, including those of its significant Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Still open are those in Seattle, Denver, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C. Charged with upholding federal law regarding issues such as racial discrimination, gender equity, and disability access, the question of what happens next remains open. At least for now, McMahon seems to be backing down into at least meeting with Democratic lawmakers and promising to do so again sometime soon.

For decades, Republicans have pushed to disband the Education Department created by former President Jimmy Carter in 1979, arguing that it was an unnecessary intrusion on states rights. According to Los Angeles Times journalist Jaweed Kaleem, in California alone there are 1,500 pending complaints. Speaking at Harvard, former OCR Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon, who served under both President Barack Obama and Joseph Biden, said, “Now with more than half the staff gone, the staff’s average caseload will exceed 100, and that means that people will not get answers, that students will graduate not knowing if the federal government would be there to protect them.” Lhamon compared the Trump administration’s approach to the most Orwellian version of education that they’ve ever had.”

Whether that’s true, though, largely depends on whom you ask. Most assuredly there were many red flags over the operation of OCR, particularly around the actual level of enforcement and particularly on follow-up even after Resolution Agreements had been signed to resolve complaints. OCR most definitely faced big challenges and has been highlighted in education systems across the country; all too often institutions have failed to implement Title IX systems that work. Title IX is the nation’s fundamental gender equity law and the process through which sexual assault and harassment claims are addressed. An entire cottage industry exists in the legal profession to investigate and, quite often, litigate such claims. Similarly, just because OCR existed didn’t mean that its mission was achieved. Complaints have spiked in recent years to just short of 20,000 complaints annually. Sometimes good intentions are just not enough.

Catherine Lhamon said in 2023 after a record high number of complaints, “The continued need for reminders and enforcement of these core civil rights requirements is disheartening.” OCR’s biggest leverage was its ability to pull federal funding, yet it never did so, not in a single case until this year (more on that shortly). This was true even as the number of complaints “ballooned by more than six times what they averaged in the 1980s.” This stayed true even as there was, in at least some cases, good cause to pull the plug on federal money, which would have grave consequences for an institution from such a loss. Yet, absent a clear deterrent, there was little incentive for school administrators to take the unit seriously in their handling of complaints. OCR lost staff over this timespan, leaving supporters to all but beg Congress for money. Former Biden Secretary Miguel Cardona told Congress in May 2024, “We are desperately in need of additional support to make sure we can investigate the cases that we have in front of us.”

OCR’s investigations could drag on for years. For example, in 2014 the average time it took the unit to resolve sexual misconduct complaints was 1,469 days, which led to complaints from Senate Democrats. OCR was supposed to resolve cases in 180 days. This wasn’t just about resources alone, though, as some would maintain; it was about a broken culture in schools, colleges, and universities that simply so often made ignoring students with grievances easier than actually addressing them.

If everyone can get away with anything, why would you bother worrying about catching another complaint? OCR’s punishment so often amounted to the equivalent of finger-waving, with perhaps the worst possible outcome being a potential referral to the Department of Justice, which happened perhaps most prominently, for example, recently at San Jose State. The California State University system at large, after outside consultants found that it quite often gravely mishandled such cases, became a reform target for lawmakers.

It sounds wrong to suppress complaints, but unless you’re caught and punished, too many institutions simply choose to exercise that option because it’s easier than dealing with the perpetrators. The Trump administration's moves to repeal the Title IX rules are most definitely part of a pro-chauvinist agenda, but whether the harm will be greater than a system that has already been failing remains to be seen. Undoubtedly, advocates are not wrong that such complaints should be investigated, and indeed it’s supposed to be “prompt, ethical, and thorough,” but so often this wasn’t happening that it’s almost a mockery of the law. This response has become so commonplace that it has its own term: “deliberate indifference.” OCR wasn’t working, but what follows could even be worse, or it could force institutions to have to deal with issues more appropriately by not assuming that the can would get kicked down the bureaucratic road.

RAND researcher Rachel Perera, using data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, found that “OCR only investigates 30-50% of cases each year, and most investigations are closed with a finding of no violation or insufficient evidence (70-80% of cases).” Most importantly, in the cases where it did take any kind of action, compliance was “almost always voluntary.” Perera’s finding was that “larger school districts and districts with 40-60% Black enrollment are more likely to receive a complaint.” She also noted an interview with a civil rights attorney who stated about the agency, “It doesn’t actually do enforcement.” The idea of a crusading civil rights agency most certainly became increasingly untrue with OCR. It wasn’t so much that OCR is a “paper tiger” as much as it was a paper sloth, so slow-moving it was largely ineffectual. It’s good to think that more funding would resolve this, but that might not be so true.

Funding isn’t always everything in government, but to a powerful higher education institution, it just might be culturally impactful. This general malaise made it all the more shocking when, as a result of the protests over the conflict between Israel and Hamas, OCR, in addition to launching widespread investigations into antisemitism, decided to freeze Columbia University’s federal funding. Using a power that it almost never used to wade into cultural conflict, OCR engaged in a maximal overreach. Secretary McMahon said about the dynamic, “Since October 7, Jewish students have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses – only to be ignored by those who are supposed to protect them.”

Many people, including Columbia University, would undoubtedly disagree with this statement, and at large colleges and universities have struggled to deal with protests from both sides in such a way that it just might be the largest cultural disruption on campuses since the Vietnam War. Furthermore, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maine have seen funding frozen over their support for transgender athletes. Trump is already seeing legal challenges over these actions.

These cases don’t occur in the abstract. Behind every complaint is a human being. That OCR’s powers are now being abused doesn’t make any less atrocious the overall failure to effectively perform its functions. Keeping complainants in limbo for hundreds and even thousands of days, much less actively suppressing matters, has real consequences. No law enforcement agency is perfect, but OCR may have just been a fatally flawed cell in a larger, deeply troubled organism. The culture wars that pervade our society have overtaken its business purpose. If it was ever possible to meet the lofty goals for the agency, that at least wasn’t my experience with the San Francisco office, which was all but complicit in giving my institution, the University of Southern California (USC), the proverbial hall pass despite having already thumbed its nose at OCR, with the response being to a two-time offender with the second offense not informing OCR of complaints regarding deceased gynecologist George Tyndall, generating one of the largest settlements in higher education history. When OCR failed, its failures could be truly harmful.

The phone line for the San Francisco office now goes straight to voicemail. One OCR attorney who was personally quite rude to me for continuing to raise issues about USC writes about the loss of her job after 35 years on LinkedIn: “It was clearly communicated to us that the work is no longer valued and was dropped with no plan to have it carried forward.” Another bemoans that “they did not do any type of evaluation of employees, to ‘keep the best’ they just shuttered over half of OCR with no reason.” Where many of these formerly employed federal workers go next remains to be seen. Trump hasn’t and can’t, without Congress, erase the law even if he can discharge employees en masse, and many will most likely turn to the institutions that they were overseeing for employment. Others will join a smattering of state offices dedicated to such work.

Still others will likely go into private practice as attorneys, becoming the very investigators whose work they were often charged with overseeing. The bureaucracy will undoubtedly, at least on some level, take care of itself even absent federal dollars, because who doesn’t love having government attorneys around? Trump may have closed the door on the OCR casket, but already it was an agency that was, at best moribund. Writing about a notable case in Riverside, CA, in 2023, summarizing the dynamic, Los Angeles Times journalist Steve Henson wrote about the dynamic: “An overriding concern is that schools routinely ignore Title IX with zero repercussions, according to experts.” Henson added, “Violations are reported to the federal Office for Civil Rights (OCR), an underfunded and understaffed agency within the Department of Education that rarely punishes schools.” Getting rid of much of OCR will have consequences, but the overriding issue may not really get better or worse as a result of Trump’s directives.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has joined 19 other Democratic states in suing to stop the cuts, claiming Trump has violated the separation of powers with Congress. The larger issue of the quality of education in America is more complicated. Undoubtedly, the tasks performed by the Education Department in terms of administering financial aid were necessary, but there could be other unintended consequences, such as rising student loan debt and a mismatch between degrees and economic demands. Society at least superficially values education, but in reality, the truth isn’t so much. Americans, to an extent, have rejected the most educated, at least if sociologists and political scientists are to be believed. Public school systems have been depleted in favor of charter schools, which are in turn offset by the private education system.

The disparity in the quality of education between large urban school districts, suburban districts, and rural districts couldn’t be more striking. America doesn’t have an equal playing field for educational access, and it certainly wasn’t ready to move toward a more tolerant education system despite many decades of struggle. The anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda is winning in a landslide, even though many of those whom it was supposed to benefit have seemingly rejected the idea of DEI, worried in no small part about being labeled a DEI hire. Trump is wrong, but could he also be right in some ways that the system for affirmative action, long embattled, simply isn’t achieving its goals? I don’t approve of Trump’s actions, but I’m also not sure we were on the path to success in the first place. Americans are really deeply divided.

Divisionism itself won’t be the solution, but it might just be that in becoming so divided, we could become more invested together. Without someone to point the finger at, to pass the buck on to, could there just maybe be some greater accountability at the local level? A recent Gallup poll found that “the percentage of adults who report feeling dissatisfied about public education has increased steadily from 62 percent to 73 percent between 2019 and 2025.” The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the feelings that were already there. Alarmingly, Americans are becoming terrible readers. Still, if you ask people how they feel about their local schools versus the system at large, they have a more positive view. Americans might just be most united in their dissatisfaction, even if they still generally like their neighbors and feel quite frustrated.

Nothing was more frustrating to me than reading the responses that OCR sent to me in response to complaints about USC’s compliance with its Tyndall Resolution Agreement. Whatever idealism was there quickly dissipated in legalese, and I’m an extremely good reader. OCR, when they didn’t want a complaint, could excel in making it go away, and they could also be extremely dishonest and even politically pandering. Trump is swinging the pendulum the other way on them, and even as I don’t begrudge anyone a job (even as I lost mine), it’s fair to say that OCR and the Education Department at large had this coming; it wasn’t a shocker.

Americans have long been after a halcyon period of positive feelings about education, and even higher education swung back towards cynicism. The degree to which this move absolutely works out or not will depend on many factors, but returning the responsibility to the local and state levels in the end might not be too bad. There should be accountability down the rung without the federal government always being the last stop for all problems. Now Republicans can stop constantly blaming the bureaucrats, and people just might have to become more invested in schools. No one ever said change, much less civil rights or education, was easy. Have Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency been indifferent? No one likes cuts, but inarguably the loss of jobs at the Education Department for many is justice served.

Link: ‘Unsatisfactory’: Dems slam McMahon for dodging questions about end of Education Department in meeting

Link: The California Office for Civil Rights is closing. What now for school discrimination cases?

Link: Former OCR Head Catherine Lhamon Talks Ed Department Cuts at HGSE

Link: OCR handled a record number of complaints in FY 2023

Link: Civil rights complaints are plaguing schools at record rates. Is the solution in Congress?

Link: Justice Delayed

Link: Justice Department Reaches $1.6M Agreement to Remedy Title IX Violations at San José State University

Link: Newsom signs law requiring stronger sexual harassment policies at CSU

Link: Does Federal Civil Rights Enforcement Impact Racial Discrimination in School Discipline?

Link: U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights Sends Letters to 60 Universities Under Investigation for Antisemitic Discrimination and Harassment

Link: DOJ, HHS, ED, and GSA Announce Initial Cancelation of Grants and Contracts to Columbia University Worth $400 Million

Link: Colleges watch nervously as Columbia scrambles to appease Trump