Trump’s Education Department Scaled Back Investigations Into Discrimination and Sexual Assault on Campus, New Data Shows

The civil rights arm of the U.S. Department of Education has dramatically scaled back investigations involving schools and colleges since the second Trump administration began, even as complaints continue to pour in, a ProPublica analysis of newly obtained records found.

The analysis shows how severely the department’s Office for Civil Rights has retracted from its mission, launching an average of about 100 new investigations a month — 1,839 total from Inauguration Day in 2025 through July 2026. The OCR launched an average of 310 new investigations each month in 2024 during the Biden administration, according to data previously obtained by ProPublica.

Under President Donald Trump, the OCR abandoned the public-facing list of schools it was investigating and the reasons for those investigations, including claims of discrimination based on race, sex and disability. ProPublica sued the department to obtain internal case data. The government subsequently provided records of the OCR’s actions in the first 18 months of Trump’s return to power, and we are publishing the data so the public can search the cases.

The decline in investigations is especially dramatic for cases involving sex discrimination. More than 200 new complaints were filed with the office related to schools’ handling of sexual violence — rape, assault and abuse. But the Trump administration launched investigations in only 29 of them, finding fault with a school district only once, according to the newly obtained data. It’s typical for there to be at least 60 sexual violence investigations opened each year.

The department addressed fewer of these cases despite continued concerns about the persistence of the problem — as demonstrated by the intense public scrutiny over how Cornell University addressed a student’s report of a 2024 gang rape.

Beyond that, the OCR launched only two investigations into discrimination based on sexual orientation.

“They’re barely doing anything to protect women and girls, including survivors of sexual violence,” said Shiwali Patel, an attorney who previously worked at the OCR and is now with the National Women’s Law Center. “They just don’t care about women and girls.”

The organization and more than 120 other advocacy, civil rights and education groups sent a letter on Tuesday to Congress’ ranking education committee leaders urging them to hold the OCR accountable for “its failure to enforce civil rights law and protect students from sexual violence.”

With OCR’s online database idle since Trump took office, the only way to know where the agency has launched investigations has been through selective department press releases, when OCR employees provided internal data to reporters or from schools and colleges that acknowledged that their institutions had become targets of the investigations.

The data ProPublica received as a result of our lawsuit can now fill that gap on the more than 1,800 civil rights investigations that the department initiated from Jan. 20, 2025, to July 29 of this year. The database also reflects the 24,000 new complaints logged through May and the nearly 17,000 new and old cases the department closed — almost always by dismissing them. 

The agency is dismissing complaints more frequently than in prior years, the records show. And fewer than 700 cases opened by the administration were resolved with a finding of wrongdoing.

The data does not include investigations that had been opened before Trump retook power but that are pending decisions by OCR — a backlog of more than 10,000 cases.

In response to questions from ProPublica, an Education Department spokesperson blamed the Biden administration for leaving office with 19,000 unresolved cases, which the Trump administration has worked to address.

“Spare us the crocodile tears as the Trump Administration is working to restore OCR to its original purpose: enforcing the law to ensure all students can receive an education free from discrimination,” spokesperson Sabin Sidney wrote.

He added that the administration “treats any form of discrimination on the basis of race or sex as illegal.” And he criticized the prior administration for endorsing policies that allowed transgender girls and women to compete in women’s athletics and use women's restrooms.

The data disclosure comes as the administration is moving forward with efforts to shut down the department and move the OCR under the Department of Justice. Disability rights advocates and others have been critical of the move, while the administration says it will lead to more efficiency and do a better job protecting students’ rights. The majority of cases before the OCR involve students with disabilities, as has been the case historically.

In the early months of Trump’s second term, Education Secretary Linda McMahon fired hundreds of employees and closed seven regional OCR offices, leaving the department severely diminished. Its remaining civil rights workers have described untenable case loads and pressure to dismiss complaints.

The remaining attorneys “are navigating pure chaos,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union that represents OCR staff. “They are being asked to use the tools they have used for their entire careers not for good, not to protect students, but to harm students. You see it in the case dismissals, the cases that target trans students or people of color.”

In examining the new records, ProPublica found the extent to which the agency has shifted its focus, as the OCR places a new emphasis on complaints that men faced discrimination. The agency launched 172 investigations into alleged “discrimination against males,” compared with 104 cases of alleged “discrimination against females” in the period examined.

It also has investigated allegations that campus programs or scholarships excluded men. For example, it investigated a complaint against Skyline College in California that had been filed in 2023 but that President Joe Biden’s administration had not acted on, according to records from the university. The complaint alleged that Skyline discriminated against men by listing scholarships on its website that are exclusively for women and for promoting a program for women.

The civil rights office opened the investigation in mid-April, and two weeks later the community college agreed that it would remove the scholarships from its website and add language that the program was open to all students. A Skyline College spokesperson did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

At the same time, the agency chose to open fewer than 370 new investigations involving racial discrimination, even though about 5,000 complaints were filed.

Of those new investigations, about 11% involved allegations of discrimination against white students. Over the summer, the department announced investigations into five medical schools’ admissions policies.

“They are not allocating their resources to racial discrimination complaints, to sexual assault complaints, to the types of complaints that really often speak to systematic discrimination and problems,” said Johnathan Smith, managing director of education at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law.

That organization also has sued the Education Department for similar information obtained by ProPublica; the lawsuit is pending.

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