Getting the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to investigate a complaint has never been a speedy process. Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, however, right-leaning nonprofits targeting transgender athletes are finding their complaints jumping to the front of the line.
Steadily, the Department of Education has been churning out investigation after investigation on instances of alleged noncompliance with Trump’s directives on Title IX. A number of these investigations originate from complaints made by conservative nonprofits like the Defense of Freedom Institute and America First Legal, which was founded by White House political adviser Stephen Miller.
At a February high school basketball game in Washington state’s Tumwater School District, a student who refused to play opposite a transgender athlete was reportedly told there would be no discrimination based on sexual identity in accordance with state and local laws.
The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, a group opposed to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, filed a complaint alleging discrimination, and the issue was catapulted into the national spotlight: Tumwater School District is now the subject of a federal investigation by the Department of Education.
Two organizations, the Defense of Freedom Institute and Liberty Justice Center, filed a complaint with OCR against the Illinois State Board of Education and Chicago Public Schools. The agency announced an investigation within two days, and tacked on Illinois’ Deerfield School District, which was cited as an example in the complaint.
The complaints — and the speed with which they are being acted upon — are a demonstration of the influence that right-wing advocacy groups have within the Trump administration. Many of these groups have been working for years in pursuit of the same policy changes regarding transgender students that Trump made law on Day 1. Some have ongoing lawsuits against Biden-era policies. Today, they have a Department of Education that is in lockstep with them on policy willing to investigate the issues they highlight.
“FAIR is thrilled that the Department of Education is opening a Title IX investigation of Tumwater School District in Washington. All female student-athletes in Washington are entitled to feel safe in sports and enjoy a fair opportunity to compete,” Monica Harris, the executive director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, said in a statement.
FAIR says it’s a nonpartisan organization, but it has taken on a wide range of right-wing projects, from arguing that New York City’s COVID-19 policies are discriminatory against white residents to arguing against the California Department of Education’s gender identity nondisclosure policy.
Unlike FAIR’s complaint against Tumwater School District, the complaint that Defense of Freedom Institute and Liberty Justice Center filed against Illinois was not on behalf of a student in connection to an incident but about the school district’s policies, which the groups argued violated Title IX and Trump’s executive order on the law.
“The Defense of Freedom Institute is pleased to work with partners across the country to expose these civil rights violations, report them to the Department of Education, and urge the agency to investigate and take forceful action against those states and school districts that refuse to comply with the law,” DFI president and co-founder Robert S. Eitel told NOTUS in a statement.
Eitel and DFI co-founder Jim Blew were Department of Education officials in Trump’s first administration.
America First Legal has filed multiple lawsuits over Title IX issues since its founding in 2021. It recently filed a complaint with the Department of Education against five Virginia school systems for alleged Title IX violations. As a result, the agency has launched an investigation.
“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,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon wrote on X. “The Trump Administration will not allow you to get away with denying women’s civil rights any longer.”
Broadly, this new Department of Education has changed the way investigations are usually conducted. The department has slowed or stopped all together investigations of the issues that previously made up most of the Office for Civil Rights’ work, like disability rights claims, in favor of department-initiated investigations into education institutions for antisemitism and gender policies.
Liberty Justice Center’s president, whose work goes beyond education to issues like free speech and government overreach, told NOTUS the group has been pleased with the work of this iteration of the Department of Education.
“We hear from many parents, from many school board members who care about these issues and want us to do something about that,” said Jacob Huebert, Liberty Justice Center’s president. “We can’t do everything that people want us to do, but we look for opportunities to protect parents’ rights, to protect educational freedom and take the opportunities that we can that we think will meaningfully advance our goals in those areas.”
Knowing that any perceived noncompliance could rise to the level of a Title IX complaint, Ellen Kahn, senior vice president of equality programs at the Human Rights Campaign, said educators are operating with an abundance of caution, wary of potentially drawing the ire of the Education Department.
In the case of Tumwater School District, in a matter of weeks, the district voted to make policy changes that align with the Trump administration’s interpretation of civil rights laws, though a school district spokesperson confirmed to NOTUS that no rules have been officially changed and that the district remains under investigation.
Some education entities that have been the subject of such investigations, like the Maine Department of Education, are pushing back and risking their federal funding in the process. But a lot aren’t.
“This feels like, we’re going to show you,” Kahn said. “And we’re going to turn the tables. And if you dare to use the pronoun of a child that’s not the pronoun that we think is their actual pronoun. Or if you’re going to be inclusive of a trans kid in a soccer game, we have a pathway for the most conservative parents out there to make a complaint.”
—
Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.