The Education Dept. Wants to End DEI. Does It Have the Staff?

The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was swamped before President Trump took a sledgehammer to it.

In the last decade, the number of discrimination complaints has more than doubled, while the number of investigators has been cut in half. Last year, the office had a staff of 588 people, most of whom were lawyers responsible for handling more than 22,000 complaints. In 2021, the first year Joe Biden was in office, more than 900 open cases were four or more years old.

Trump has now directed the office to root out diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at America’s 6,000 colleges, announcing several new investigations every week.

With last month’s rash of layoffs, longtime supporters of that vision say he may not have the staff to execute it. By law, every investigation requires due process.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon last month fired more than 240 OCR employees, almost 40 percent of the staff.

Mark Perry, a former professor who has filed close to 1,000 OCR complaints alleging sex- or race-based discrimination at colleges — the majority targeting programs he says exclude men and white people — said that for years the office has been slow to open and complete investigations, despite the loads of evidence he said he’s compiled. In January 2019, for example, Perry filed a complaint against the University of Michigan for 11 programs he said discriminated against men, among them a student organization focused on professional and social development of women in electrical engineering. OCR has yet to complete its investigation.

“My concern is fewer employees, fewer staff attorneys, fewer investigators, more complaints, more investigations,” Perry said.

William A. Jacobson, a Cornell law professor who has filed more than 60 OCR complaints over identity-conscious programs, said, “I think it is in the interest of this Trump administration’s policy to maintain a more vigorous OCR function, whether it’s at the Department of Education or the Department of Justice or someplace else. But I think they will end up damaging their goals if they eliminate OCR.”

Lawyers who worked for OCR under Biden say having so many complaints and so few investigators will cause lasting damage to the federal government’s ability to enforce civil rights in America’s increasingly diverse classrooms.

Last month, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates along with two parents who have pending claims with the OCR sued the Department of Education for violating the equal-protection clause of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the federal government from discriminating against individuals or denying individuals fair treatment under the law.

“Without even minimally adequate staffing, OCR cannot fulfill its mandate and move complaint investigation and processing forward,” the lawsuit reads. “OCR has abdicated its responsibility to enforce civil rights protections, leaving students who should be able to trust and rely on their government to protect and defend their rights to instead endure discriminatory and unsafe learning environments without recourse.”

A spokesperson for the Office for Civil Rights did not return requests for comment.

The Office for Civil Rights was established by Congress in 1979 to investigate accusations of discrimination in K-12 schools and on college campuses on the basis of race, national origin, sex, disability, or age. It soon had more than 1,000 employees and became an accessible and free avenue for students and parents to bring attention to discrimination in schools and colleges without filing a costly lawsuit. (The complaints can be expensive for colleges, which over the last several decades have hired DEI and Title IX officers to prevent them.)

From the 1980s to early 2000s, the office annually received between 3,000 and 7,000 discrimination complaints. In the last two decades, though, the number of complaints has significantly jumped, while the number of people assigned to investigate them has plummeted, according to OCR annual reports.

Between 2015 and 2016, the number of OCR complaints increased by 60 percent, from about 10,400 to more than 16,700. The number of cases dropped during Covid, but rose as students returned to the classroom, and by 2022 exceeded 18,800.

Former lawyers for the office say the sharp rise reflects parents’ and students’ increased trust in the agency. It’s also true that more than 6,000 of the complaints filed in 2024 were filed by a single person alleging that various institutions were practicing sex discrimination. That person hasn’t been publicly identified.

Last year, more than half of the complaints to OCR, or around 11,800, were about sex discrimination, while historically the majority have alleged disability discrimination.

With just 348 staff members remaining, the number of cases per investigator could balloon up to 200, said Ray Li, a former OCR lawyer.

“There are only about 220 working days a year, and so you have to resolve a case every day and get no new cases,” Li said. “So it’s just impossible.”

Civil-rights activists have long complained about the lack of investigators.

Last year, Biden requested an additional $22.4 million for OCR to deal with the volume of complaints, a 14-percent increase from the previous year. A portion of the money would have gone toward hiring more than 75 additional OCR investigators. Congress rejected the president’s request.

Investigating a single complaint, negotiating with administrators over a resolution, and monitoring whether a college is complying with that resolution can be a long and tedious process, said Catherine Lhamon, a former chair at OCR under the Obama and Biden administrations.

After opening a complaint, an investigator typically requests from the college relevant policies, disciplinary records, incident reports, and any data that the college has on disparities by race, gender, or disability.

Investigators then conduct hours of interviews with students, parents, and administrators, comb through social-media accounts of the alleged perpetrators, look at dozens of videos and pictures, and sometimes travel to the college to assess for themselves whether any policies or infrastructure are discriminatory. (As part of the layoffs last month, McMahon shuttered seven of the office’s 12 regional offices, meaning a large portion of investigators are not located near many of America’s colleges.)

When an investigator finds that discrimination did occur, they negotiate with administrators over a resolution agreement that they think will prevent future discrimination. Revoking federal funds is a rare step. Past resolutions have included requiring colleges to publish anti-harassment statements, provide discrimination and harassment training, and revise discrimination policies and procedures.

OCR then monitors compliance over the following years, depending on the resolution agreement, by routinely requesting documents to make sure colleges are taking the remedial steps agreed upon.

“The bigger the case, the more extensive the resolution agreement is,” said Miriam Nunberg, a former OCR lawyer under the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. “And the only way that agreement has teeth, is if OCR has the staff to monitor it.”

After Trump’s inauguration in January, OCR enacted a monthlong pause on nearly all discrimination investigations. When the pause was lifted by Craig Trainor, the agency’s acting director, the announced investigations mostly aligned with the administration’s priorities: ending programs that discriminate against white, Jewish, and Asian students and prohibiting transgender students from participating in girls’ and women’s sports.

Trainor then on February 14 issued a “Dear Colleague” letter, drastically expanding the definition of discrimination to include the consideration of race, gender, or other identity in scholarships, financial aid, graduation ceremonies, and student life.

The letter prompted several colleges to shutter DEI programs. A lawsuit against that letter is pending in court. OCR later clarified that programs focused on particular identities or religions would not be deemed illegal as long as they were open to all students.

Last month, OCR announced direct investigations into 45 universities for alleged discrimination against white and Asian students due to the universities’ involvement with the PhD Project, a nonprofit organization that aims to increase the number of Black, Latino, and Native American students pursuing doctoral degrees.

The office also announced six OCR investigations into colleges for alleged “impermissible race-based scholarships and race-based segregation.”

It is not uncommon for a new administration to change OCR’s priorities. In a Dear Colleague letter sent by the Biden administration, OCR said it would amend Trump-era Title IX policies that gave more protections for students accused of sexual assault. During the Biden administration, the Education Department published reports promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in student retention, student recruitment, admissions, and financial aid.

Former lawyers for the office say Trump’s OCR is actively investigating discrimination against Jewish, Asian, and white complainants while neglecting other victims.

On March 10, OCR announced it had sent letters to 60 colleges warning them of potential enforcement actions if they did not protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus. Several of the institutions had previously reached agreements with the Biden administration to close antisemitism investigations, and others had never been on investigation for antisemitism previously.

“Cherry-picking schools to investigate to boost a political agenda is not the role of OCR,” said Katie Dullum, an OCR investigator who resigned last month. “It’s just not, and that’s what we’re seeing.”

Dullum said that under the pause investigators weren’t even allowed to respond to parents’ emails asking for updates about their child’s case.

“It’s pretty common at the start of an administration for cases to be frozen to an extent while the new administration kind of gets their footing,” Dullum said, adding that in the past, even if cases were frozen, lawyers were able to get permission to move things forward when dealing with a particularly vulnerable student. “It was unusual that they froze everything, absolutely everything, for quite a while.”

In her confirmation hearing in January, McMahon said she would consider moving OCR to the Department of Justice. The investigation and resolution process for complaints will be slower and sporadic if OCR is taken out of the Education Department, former lawyers for the office argue. In the Education Department, OCR is supposed to assess each complaint it receives. By design, the Department of Justice is not obligated to litigate every case it receives; it focuses its legal efforts on cases that have sizable federal interest.

“Moving any components of the department to another entity that lacks the expertise that the department has about the specific function, which is equal opportunity in education, is damaging,” Lhamon said. “I can’t tell you enough how important it is to have people all day long, every day working on the different ways that schools effectively serve kids.”

Both Perry and Jacobson, the anti-DEI watchdogs, think OCR is an essential tool to get colleges to shut down scholarships, culture centers, and hiring and admissions practices that operate behind closed doors.

But they don’t think the solution is more investigators.

“Unless these new investigators are twice as efficient or three times as efficient as in the old days, there’s still the potential for long delays that are not just months and years, but four or five, six years,” Perry said.

Both say the office’s procedures need to change. Jacobson said OCR dismissed some of his complaints due to pending lawsuits, despite the lawsuits not covering the same issues.

Meanwhile, the number of OCR investigations continue to tick upward.

Last week, the Education Department and the Department of Justice announced the launch of a Title IX Special Investigations Team to handle the staggering number of Title IX complaints. The new team, composed of investigators from both departments, will work to “ensure timely, consistent resolutions to protect students, and especially female athletes, from the pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities,” the announcement read.

Department spokespeople did not answer a question about whether the team would include any new hires.

“Traditionally, our Office for Civil Rights takes months, even years, to complete Title IX investigations. OCR under this Administration has moved faster than it ever has, and the Title IX SIT will ensure even more rapid and consistent investigations,” McMahon said in the announcement. “To all the entities that continue to allow men to compete in women’s sports and use women’s intimate facilities: there’s a new sheriff in town. We will not allow you to get away with denying women’s civil rights any longer.”