In a powerful commentary earlier this week, NY Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie describes decades of protests and Civil Rights advocacy that resulted in the Voting Rights Act of 1965: “It wasn’t the brainchild of out-of-touch bureaucrats in Washington… It was, instead, an achievement of the most effective social movement of the postwar United States. The truth is that the Voting Rights Act was conceived, crafted and passed in order to further realize American democracy… forced onto the national agenda by the tireless work of the grassroots activists… who struggled, bled and put their lives on the line in a fierce fight to secure their fundamental rights as Americans.”

The U.S. Department of Education and its Office for Civil Rights were established by bureaucrats in Washington, but their purpose was to protect the civil rights reforms in education that had been accomplished by the long and arduous grassroots struggle to make real the promise of full educational rights for the children who had been shut out of opportunity since slavery.  The Office for Civil Rights was set up to respond to families’ complaints when their children are mistreated at school in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Protecting students’ civil rights emerged as a federal responsibility in the decades following Brown v. Board of Education, and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was folded into the U.S. Department of Education at its inception in 1979. OCR’s mission has expanded to include protecting students experiencing discriminatory school discipline, seclusion or restraint, sexual violence, or discrimination due to their disability or religion or country of origin. A February report from Senator Bernie Sanders’ office explains:

“Make no mistake about what OCR does and why it matters. When a child with a disability is denied the education they are legally entitled to, they call OCR. When a child is sexually harassed at school and the school does nothing, they call OCR. When a student is subjected to racial harassment, antisemitism, Islamophobia, or other shared ancestry discrimination, they call OCR. OCR exists because Congress decided decades ago that the federal government has an obligation to protect the civil rights of every student in America.”

The Brookings Brown Center on Education Policy’s Rachel M. Perera explains precisely how the Office for Civil Rights is designed to serve the public: “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.”  OCR investigators have traditionally understood their role as working with school districts to develop resolution agreements for programs and policies that protect students rather than imposing immediate financial penalties.

Trump Administration Destroys the Office for Civil Rights

Perera details the many steps the Trump administration has taken to “turn civil rights enforcement into a discriminatory tool.” In the past year, the OCR has limited its focus to three specific issues: framing “gender inclusive campuses and programs… as sex-based discrimination against girls,” recasting as racism “discrimination against white (and/or) Asian) students,” and using allegations of antisemitism “to initiate sweeping investigations to address longstanding conservative complaints about higher education.”

Perera explains how those areas of focus have translated during the second Trump administration into some specific tasks of OCR: “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… 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 VI case involving racial discrimination against Black students.”

Sometimes, writes Perera, OCR’s actions fail to comport with federal law: “Nothing in the text of Title IX prohibits schools from allowing transgender students… (to access) facilities that align with their gender identity. To the contrary, several U.S. Courts of Appeals… have held that Title IX requires schools to allow such access.”

Perera adds that the Office for Civil Rights has significantly altered the origin of the  cases being investigated. Although “OCR is obligated to respond to the civil rights complaints it receives… over the last year, OCR has prioritized… administration-directed investigations, as well as investigations into complaints filed by right-wing advocacy groups,” but not complaints filed by parents.

Perera reminds us that, although OCR’s primary purpose has been establishing resolution agreements with school districts to prescribe steps to prevent further violations of students’ rights, this year OCR has suddenly, without explanation, cancelled  resolution agreements reached under previous administrations. For example, in April of 2025,  OCR announced the sudden termination of a consent agreement protecting the rights of Native American students in the Rapid City, South Dakota public schools.

Not only has the Trump administration violated students’ rights, but Perera reports that OCR has also violated school districts’ and universities’ due process rights by abruptly cancelling funding without following required procedures. Procedures being ignored include: “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 the Education Department would terminate federal funding.” Sudden funding cuts have affected research funding at universities like UCLA, Brown, Harvard, and Columbia and magnet school grants for the public school districts of Fairfax County, Virginia, and New York City.

The scale of the Office for Civil Rights’ egregious failure to investigate complaints filed by families during Donald Trump’s second term portends OCR’s utter collapse. Senator Sanders’ office summarizes the failure: “(D)espite OCR receiving an expected record number of civil rights complaints in 2025, Trump’s OCR reached just 112 resolution agreements—the fewest in at least 12 years. In 2025, Trump’s OCR reached zero resolution agreements involving sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion or restraint, racial harassment, or discriminatory school discipline. Trump’s OCR has effectively stopped protecting students, reaching resolution agreements in just 1% of pending cases in 2025.”

In the spring of 2025 Linda McMahon’s Department shuttered seven of the Office for Civil Rights’ regional offices—in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco—with only five remaining open—in Washington, DC, Atlanta, Kansas City, Denver, and Seattle—and put a huge percentage of OCR’s staff attorneys on administrative leave for months. Education Week‘s Alyson Klein just reported that “the Department spent up to $38 million last year paying staffers from its Office for Civil Rights to remain on administrative leave while courts stymied the Trump administration’s efforts to lay them off.” Press reports indicated, however, that in December, McMahon called staff back to address what had become an enormous backlog of complaints.

No one has really known how that effort to recall staff and investigate complaints is going until this week when Politico‘s, Bianca Quilantan and Hannah Psalma Ramirez shared the sorry news that, while OCR had 575 employees—mostly attorneys—in 2024, by May of 2026, the office had a staff of only 321.  In December 2025, OCR called back 247 of those who had been put on administrative leave.  While 85 attorneys did return to work, some of those have chosen not to stay. “Staffers have chosen not to come back or are leaving the agency because they retired, got new jobs, and are concerned about job stability. But some are uncomfortable with the work.”

The reporters quote Linda Mangel, OCR’s former enforcement director who has resigned: “There’s been a steady parade of people leaving… Even the people who weren’t RIFed were so shaken by what was happening in the agency that they have steadily left.” Mangel,who served previously in the Justice Departments under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, explains that in those administrations: “we weren’t asked to do things that were inconsistent with the law…  I could always do some good. They weren’t weaponizing civil rights ever, and now they are.”