Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on May 23, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) can no longer fulfill its legal duties due to severe funding cuts, staffing reductions, and office closures, a motion for preliminary injunction alleged this month in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration.
An attorney representing students and parents in the lawsuit told the College Fix that the Trump administration has pulled “the rug out from under” families who rely on the office.
“Plaintiffs have been injured and continue to be injured because Defendants’ actions and inactions subject them to discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity and deprive them of equal access to OCR’s civil rights complaint procedures,” the complaint states.
The motion asks the court to “immediately halt the Department’s recent policy decision to abandon thousands of investigations” within OCR, according to a May 5 news release from the National Center for Youth Law.
The group of students and parents involved in the lawsuit are represented by the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL).
Johnathan Smith, general counsel at NCYL, told the Fix that by laying off half the staff and closing more than half the offices, the Trump administration is rendering OCR’s process “impossible” because there aren’t enough people and resources to accomplish anything.
The lawsuit also alleges an Equal Protection Clause violation, asserting that the Trump administration’s new “End DEI” portal in the Office for Civil Rights prioritizes certain complaints over others, creating an unfair focus.
The administration, according to Smith, incentivizes individuals “to file those types of investigations at the same time [they’re] shutting down the process for everyone else.”
He also told the Fix that former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, under the Obama administration, was asked about the lawsuit on CNN several weeks ago, and Duncan described the civil rights office as a “system of last resort.” Essentially, he said people don’t go to the office if they have any other available option or venue.
With OCR’s dismantling, “they are literally pulling the rug out from under the feet of families and children that need and rely on this system,” Smith told the Fix.
[RELATED: The Department of Education—To Be, or Not to Be, That Is the Question]
The Fix reached out to current Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, and Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor twice via email for comment in the last month, but did not receive responses.
In another perspective on the ongoing lawsuit, Mark Perry, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Michigan, told the Fix that OCR was already ineffective under the Biden administration.
Perry has dealt with the federal office over the past six years, as he’s filed approximately 1,000 civil rights complaints for over 2,000 alleged violations of Title VI and Title IX at nearly 900 higher education institutions.
Under Biden, the office struggled to effectively handle these complaints, as evidenced by his backlog of over 300 unresolved cases, he said.
Even before Trump’s recent changes, OCR “was frequently unresponsive, unprofessional, and incompetent” due to the staffing levels at 12 regional offices, Perry told the Fix.
He believes his experience supports the lawsuit’s claim that the office is too understaffed to enforce federal civil rights laws, especially now that the number of filed complaints has “increased significantly.”
According to Perry, there has been some discussion of OCR’s duties moving to the Department of Justice as the Trump administration continues working to dissolve the Department of Education.
“Perhaps a new home for OCR, with an increased budget and staff, will eventually allow [it] to properly, professionally and efficiently handle and resolve federal civil rights complaints,” Perry told the Fix.
Ultimately, its short-term future “seems problematic,” Perry said.
Smith agreed with Perry, telling the Fix that the system was not “perfect” even before the reductions, as “there were large backlogs that children and families had to wait far too long to receive information about the system.”
However, the National Center for Youth Law believes dismantling OCR only makes the situation worse.
Instead, Smith said the reductions in force need to be undone. Staff should be hired instead of fired, offices should be opened instead of closed, and work should be done to establish an office that can “provide the assistance that people deserve,” he said.
Smith said he hopes that a “fair and neutral process is equally applied to all people in this case.”
Image: “Donald Trump” by Gage Skidmore on Flickr