Trump has already weaponized the Department of Education
He vowed to kill it. What he's doing to it instead is even worse.
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During the 2024 election, Donald Trump made no secret of his plan to close the Department of Education (DOE). That hasn’t happened yet, though an executive order that would functionally dismantle the agency is in the works. In the meantime, Trump is already exploiting it to dehumanize and harass marginalized groups.
The administration is busy using the department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) to attack trans kids while shuttering nearly every other type of civil rights investigation. It’s a complete abdication of the federal government’s role in protecting students from discrimination and a grim example of how Trump is weaponizing the federal government.
Conservatives have wanted to shutter the DOE for decades, saying that education policy is best set at the state and local levels. The problem with that argument is that education policy is already set by states and localities. There is no such thing as a federal education curriculum, and the federal government can’t tell schools what to teach. But what the DOE can do is investigate schools for failing to follow federal civil rights laws.
While conservatives might assume that the DOE’s civil rights investigations are all about imposing woke ideologies on red state parents, most complaints to OCR are about schools discriminating based on disability. Given that Trump is mounting a full-scale attack on accessibility, it isn’t surprising that the DOE has simply stopped investigating the thousands of disability-related complaints that were already in process.
Most of these types of complaints are filed by students, their families, or legal advocacy groups. ProPublica found that when Trump took office, there were roughly 12,000 investigations in the pipeline, around 6,000 of which were disability-related. About 3,200 complaints were regarding racial discrimination, and around 1,000 related to sexual harassment.
Now, all of those complaints are on ice, with ProPublica reporting that investigators have been barred from communicating with the complainants. Instead, the DOE has opened about 20 investigations based on rightwing culture war grievances. It’s a clear statement about the administration’s priorities and a clear threat to any school or organization that won’t fall in line.
One week into Trump’s second term, OCR opened an investigation into Ithaca City Schools in New York over their yearly summits for students of color. The complaint came from the Equal Protection Project, which was founded by Cornell University Law Professor William A. Jacobson and exists solely to attack affirmative action programs. The OCR investigation sends a message that it takes nonsensical allegations of anti-white racism seriously and that affinity groups and events that simply allow students of color to gather will be considered discriminatory.
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What happened to states’ rights?
The administration has made attacking trans people a centerpiece of everything it does, so it isn’t surprising that several of the DOE investigations have been launched into schools or organizations with policies protecting trans students.
America First Legal, the group founded by Trump senior adviser and all-around ghoul Stephen Miller, teed up a complaint about five Virginia school districts that allow transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity. According to America First, this violates Title IX, which prohibits discrimination based on sex, by giving “greater rights to students whose ‘gender identity’ does not match their biological sex than it does to students whose ‘gender identity’ matches their biological sex.” Letting students use their preferred pronouns also allegedly violates Title IX somehow.
This is an incoherent argument and really just another way for conservatives to attack the very existence of trans kids in schools. There’s no question this administration will bring the hammer down on these districts unless they reverse their policies.
The DOE doesn’t actually need the fig leaf of an external complaint, as it has the power to initiate its own investigations. So, it’s going after Denver Public Schools for having some all-gender restrooms. Those restrooms came out of a student-led process and a requirement that every school have at least one all-gender bathroom. But under the Trump administration, what students want doesn’t matter, and the mere existence of all-gender restrooms is discriminatory.
The administration is also making clear that any states allowing transgender students to participate in high school athletics are going to be investigated. It’s a stance that makes a mockery of the ostensible conservative states’ rights viewpoint. In theory, states should be able to make their own determinations about high school sports. There are no federal laws about high school sports, so there is no reason that different states can’t make other decisions about how they’re regulated.
But the administration doesn’t believe in local control. It believes in imposing, by any means, the conservative viewpoint on blue states. That’s why, last week, it opened investigations into the governing bodies for high school sports in California and Minnesota. Both states allow trans students to participate in high school sports in conformance with their gender identity. According to the administration, this conflicts with Trump’s executive order banning trans women from participating in women’s sports.
But an executive order isn’t a law, as much as Trump would like to think it is, and both California and Minnesota have actual laws on their books requiring protection of trans athletes. California’s education code says that students are allowed to participate in sports consistent with their gender identity and Minnesota’s anti-discrimination law forbids discrimination based on gender identity. In other words, neither state could bar trans students from playing high school sports without running afoul of their own laws. It will ultimately be up to the courts to figure out if Trump’s executive order can functionally overrule state laws, a depressing thought given the conservative stranglehold on the federal courts.
In an incredibly cynical move, the DOE also opened investigations into five universities for antisemitism. The five schools — Columbia, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern, and Portland State — are all under fire for pro-Palestinian protests that occurred on campus. Conservatives were furious that the Biden administration didn’t shut them down and are now praising Trump for “taking action to protect Jewish students.”
Of course, this administration has no intention of protecting Jewish students. Not only is Trump dismantling civil rights protections across the board, but both he and JD Vance have consistently been openly, wildly anti-semitic.
Trump has accused Jewish people of insufficient loyalty to America and trafficked in the antisemitic trope that Jews control all the money. JD Vance has invoked the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which says that Jewish people are behind a scheme to replace white Americans with immigrants who will always vote for Democrats. Vance has also cozied up to AfD, the far-right antisemitic German party. These are not people who are genuinely interested in ensuring that Jewish students are not discriminated against on college campuses. Instead, these are people who are willing to weaponize allegations of antisemitism. It’s also a way to signal that dissent on college campuses will not be tolerated.
While the administration is busy using OCR as an attack dog, actual complaints about real discrimination are not being investigated. For parents, an OCR investigation is often the only method to force schools to provide proper disability accommodations. Filing a complaint is free, and if OCR chooses to investigate, that’s free as well. The alternative is hiring a private attorney to try to force compliance via a lawsuit against the school, which is a much more expensive proposition.
Upside down world
The future of the Department of Education isn’t clear at all. Trump has waffled about whether he thinks he can get away with (illegally) eradicating a cabinet-level agency with the stroke of a pen, but in any event he has a compliant Congress that may be willing to get rid of it for him. GOP Sen. Mike Rounds, from South Dakota, introduced a bill to eliminate the department before Trump even took office. Over in the House of Representatives, Rep. Thomas Massie has done the same.
Trump’s nominee to lead the department, former WWE exec Linda McMahon, has proposed breaking it apart rather than fully shutting it down, and would send OCR to the Department of Justice. If that happens, all civil rights investigations related to education would be under the control of a DOJ that has renounced any independence from Trump.
No matter what happens to the DOE, the real losers are students and their parents. An agency division that once had a robust commitment to making sure that schools didn’t discriminate against students is already nothing but a hollowed-out shell, a vehicle for Trump to impose maximum pain. This isn’t what government is for, but it’s what our government is now.
That’s it for today
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My house has two and a half gender neutral bathrooms, as do the neighbors on either side. One actually has three gender neutral bathrooms.
If we, by some miracle, manage to have actual elections that get an actual government back in place sometime down the line, every single person working for trump needs to be thrown into prison for the rest of their lives. Along with every single Republican in the country. And everyone who voted for trump needs to have their voting rights permanently revoked.