The Trump administration on Friday announced a major change in Title IX enforcement at schools and colleges, tapping the U.S. Department of Justice to help investigate and ultimately enforce the separation of transgender students from girls’ and women’s athletics teams and spaces in schools and colleges.
The Title IX Special Investigations Team shifts some civil rights investigations and enforcement from the U.S. Department of Education to the Department of Justice — both of which are a part of the newly minted unit.
The move is part of a Trump administration effort to push through a backlog of complaints at the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. These investigations usually take months — sometimes years — to complete. The process typically includes interviews and other tools and ultimately ends in resolution agreements to bring schools into compliance.
Instead, the department will rely on a rapid resolution process to address sex discrimination complaints, framing the move as a way to protect cisgender girls and women, according to a Friday announcement. Rapid resolution is “an expedited case processing approach,” according to the Trump administration’s case processing manual, which was updated in January.
There are certain requirements before rapid resolution is an option, including having the complainant initiate the expedited process and having schools on board with that plan of action to resolve a complaint. The tool can be tapped when schools have already taken action to resolve the complaint on their own accord. It was used under the previous administration as well to address the increasing volume of complaints.
“OCR under this Administration has moved faster than it ever has, and the Title IX SIT will ensure even more rapid and consistent investigations,” U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said in Friday’s 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.”
Attorney General Pamela Bondi said in an accompanying statement that “protecting women and women’s sports is a key priority” for the Department of Justice. The agency will “ take comprehensive action when women’s sports or spaces are threatened,” she continued. The administration has often used that language to separate transgender students from programs spaces aligning with their gender identities with blanket bans.
The department’s formal announcement that it is handing off Title IX enforcement to the Justice Department and joining forces on investigations comes after weeks of collaboration between the two agencies, confirming suspicions from education civil rights attorneys that DOJ involvement will be the new normal.
It was also expected, considering that Education Department layoffs gutted half of OCR enforcement offices nationwide, and the department was already relying on the DOJ in the layoffs’ wake.
The Education Department already tapped the Justice Department in an investigation the Trump administration launched into the Maine Department of Education over the state’s transgender athlete policy.
“Why would they continue to administratively enforce when they’re trying to put themselves out of jobs?” Kayleigh Baker, a Title IX attorney for TNG Consulting, an education civil rights consultant group, surmised late last month in wake of the Maine case. “And so I think leaning on DOJ makes sense.”
Prior to this administration, the DOJ was rarely called off the bench to enforce civil rights protections in schools, and its involvement was usually only reserved for complex and high-profile cases.
The move to more heavily involve the Justice Department in education civil rights enforcement also comes as the administration aims to shift other Education Department responsibilities to outside agencies. In March, for example, the administration announced that it intends to move special education oversight to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Lawsuits challenging the Education Department’s mass layoffs claim they have compromised the agency’s ability to continue statutory responsibilities such as civil rights enforcement. But the department told K-12 Dive in a March email that would not be the case.
“We are confident that the dedicated staff of OCR will deliver on its statutory responsibilities,” said department spokesperson Madi Biedermann at the time.
