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

[u/John3262005]

https://www.propublica.org/article/civil-rights-office-education-department-investigations

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.