The decision comes months after the Supreme Court ruled in a parallel case that the Education Department could move forward with firing nearly half its employees.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
After months of uncertainty, a federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Education Department can move forward with firing half of the 550 employees at its Office for Civil Rights.
In March, the department enacted a reduction-in-force plan to eliminate nearly half of its employees, including 276 at OCR, as part of wider effort to dismantle the 45-year-old agency. Those RIFs prompted multiple lawsuits against the department, including New York v. McMahon and the Victim Rights Law Center v. Department of Education; while the former challenged RIFs across the entire department, the latter case was restricted to the RIFs within OCR.
Federal district judges issued injunctions in both cases during the litigation process. Then, in July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the McMahon case that the department could proceed with firing half its staff. Despite that ruling, a federal judge in Massachusetts refused to vacate the injunction preventing the department from firing the staff at OCR, arguing that the cases—and therefore their related rulings—remained separate.
The government appealed that decision and requested a stay of the RIF injunction. On Monday the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit granted that request, giving OCR the green light to fire half its staff.
“We note the district court’s careful analysis concluding that the Department’s decision to reduce by half the staff of OCR, a statutorily-created office, imperils Congress’s mandate that OCR ‘enforce federal civil rights laws that ban discrimination based on race, sex, and disability in the public education system,’” the court’s opinion read. “In this stay posture and at this preliminary stage of the litigation, however, we cannot conclude that this case differs enough from McMahon to reach a contrary result to the Supreme Court’s order staying the injunction in McMahon.”
Washington rejected OCR’s demand for a personal apology Monday.
Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images
George Mason University president Gregory Washington has rejected demands by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights that he apologize for alleged discriminatory hiring practices, questioning the findings of an OCR investigation that accused him of implementing “unlawful DEI policies.”
In a letter to GMU’s board Monday, Washington’s attorney, Douglas F. Gansler, alleged that OCR cut its fact-finding efforts short and only interviewed two university deans before reaching the conclusions the Department of Education published Friday. Gansler wrote that “OCR’s letter contains gross mischaracterizations of statements made by Dr. Washington and outright omissions” related to the university’s DEI practices.
Gansler also accused OCR of selectively interpreting various remarks by Washington, the first Black president in GMU’s history.
“To be clear, per OCR’s own findings, no job applicant has been discriminated against by GMU, nor has OCR attempted to name someone who has been discriminated against by GMU in any context. Therefore, it is a legal fiction for OCR to even assert or claim that there has been a Title VI or Title IX violation here,” Gansler wrote in a 10-page letter.
ED has demanded changes at GMU and a personal apology from Washington.
“In 2020, University President Gregory Washington called for expunging the so-called ‘racist vestiges’ from GMU’s campus,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement released by the Department of Education last week. “Without a hint of self awareness, President Washington then waged a university-wide campaign to implement unlawful DEI policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race. You can’t make this up.”
In his letter to the board, Gansler emphasized that under Washington’s leadership, GMU has complied with executive orders that cracked down on DEI programs and practices, pointing to recent changes such as the dissolution of GMU’s DEI office and restricting the use of diversity statements in hiring.
“If the Board entertains OCR’s demand that Dr. Washington personally apologize for promoting unlawful discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes, it will undermine GMU’s record of compliance. An apology will amount to an admission that the university did something unlawful, opening GMU and the Board up to legal liability for conduct that did not occur under the Board’s watch,” Gansler wrote. He added that admitting to such violations could bring about punitive action from other federal agencies, such as the Department of Justice.
Washington’s rejection of an apology and dispute over the claims made by OCR comes shortly after speculation that GMU’s Board of Visitors—which includes numerous conservative political figures and activists appointed by Republican Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin—would fire him. Instead, the board gave Washington a raise after a lengthy closed-door meeting earlier this month that brought dozens of protesters out to show their support for the besieged president.
Asked for a statement, GMU officials referred Inside Higher Ed to Gansler.
ED did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
The U.S. Department of Education said it plans to bring back more than 260 Office for Civil Rights staff that it cut as part of its March reduction in force, returning groups of employees to the civil rights enforcement arm in waves every two weeks Sept. 8 through Nov. 3.
The department’s Aug. 19 update was filed as required by a federal judge’s order in Victim Rights Law Center v. U.S. Department of Education directing that the Education Department be restored to “the status quo” so it can “carry out its statutory functions.”
Since March, the Education Department has been paying the OCR employees about $1 million per week to sit idle on administrative leave, according to the update.
Dive Insight:
The update, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, comes as a U.S. Supreme Court emergency order in a separate but similar case allowed the agency to move forward with mass layoffs across the entire department, rather than just OCR.
That case — New York v. McMahon— was overseen by the same judge who ordered on June 18 that OCR be restored to its former capacity.
Last week, Judge Myong Joun said he stood by his OCR order regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York v. McMahon because the students who brought the Victim Rights Law Center case have “unique harms that they have suffered due to the closure of the OCR.”
In March, the Education Department closed seven of its 12 regional offices as part of the layoffs that impacted 1,300 staffers across the entire department.
Civil rights and public education advocates, as well as lawmakers and education policy experts warned that such a significant slash to OCR would compromise students’ civil rights and compromise their equal access to education that OCR is meant to protect.
In April, the Victim Rights Law Center case was brought by two students who “faced severe discrimination and harassment in school and were depending on the OCR to resolve their complaints so that they could attend public school,” said Joun in his Aug. 13 decision.
The Education Department’s update this week that it is returning OCR employees to work is in compliance with Joun’s decision.
After Joun ordered the Education Department in the New York case to restore the department more broadly, the administration filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court to push the RIF through.
The department did not respond by press time to K-12 Dive’s inquiry as to whether it intends to likewise appeal the Victim Rights Law Center decision to the Supreme Court.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
Dive Brief:
The U.S. Department of Education said it plans to bring back more than 260 Office for Civil Rights staff that it cut as part of its March reduction in force, returning groups of employees to the civil rights enforcement arm in waves every two weeks Sept. 8 through Nov. 3.
The department’s Aug. 19 update was filed as required by a federal judge’s order in Victim Rights Law Center v. U.S. Department of Education directing that the Education Department be restored to “the status quo” so it can “carry out its statutory functions.”
Since March, the Education Department has been paying the OCR employees about $1 million per week to sit idle on administrative leave, according to the update.
Dive Insight:
The update, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, comes as a U.S. Supreme Court emergency order in a separate but similar case allowed the agency to move forward with mass layoffs across the entire department, rather than just OCR.
That case — New York v. McMahon— was overseen by the same judge who ordered on June 18 that OCR be restored to its former capacity.
Last week, Judge Myong Joun said he stood by his OCR order regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York v. McMahon because the students who brought the Victim Rights Law Center case have “unique harms that they have suffered due to the closure of the OCR.”
In March, the Education Department closed seven of its 12 regional offices as part of the layoffs that impacted 1,300 staffers across the entire department.
Civil rights and public education advocates, as well as lawmakers and education policy experts warned that such a significant slash to OCR would compromise students’ civil rights and compromise their equal access to education that OCR is meant to protect.
In April, the Victim Rights Law Center case was brought by two students who “faced severe discrimination and harassment in school and were depending on the OCR to resolve their complaints so that they could attend public school,” said Joun in his Aug. 13 decision.
The Education Department’s update this week that it is returning OCR employees to work is in compliance with Joun’s decision.
After Joun ordered the Education Department in the New York case to restore the department more broadly, the administration filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court to push the RIF through.
The department did not respond by press time to K-12 Dive’s inquiry as to whether it intends to likewise appeal the Victim Rights Law Center decision to the Supreme Court.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
A federal judge is standing by his June decision requiring the U.S. Department of Education torestore its Office for Civil Rights “to the status-quo” so it can “carry out its statutory functions.” The order, which prevents the department from laying off OCR employees, comes despite a U.S. Supreme Court emergency order in a separate case allowing the agency to move forward with mass layoffs across the department.
The case challenging the gutting of OCR, which included the shuttering of seven out of 12 regional OCR offices, was brought by two students who “faced severe discrimination and harassment in school and were depending on the OCR to resolve their complaints so that they could attend public school,” said Judge Myong Joun in his Aug. 13 decision.
The Education Department appealed Joun’s ruling Thursday to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to allow the department to move forward with its OCR closures.
The court battle prolongs the administrative leave of OCR employees that began in March, after the department laid off more than 1,300 staff across the entire Education Department. President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon pushed the layoffs as a way to “end bureaucratic bloat” and downsize the federal government, including its expenses.
However, according to American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union representing a majority of the laid-off Education Department employees, the federal government has been paying around $7 million a month just for employees to sit idle on administrative leave.
The employees’ administrative leave that began in March originally ended with their termination on June 9. However, court cases blocking the department’s gutting have prolonged their employment.
According to the numbers released by the agency last year, OCR received a record number of complaints against K-12 and higher education institutions in 2023, the most recent year for which numbers are available, surpassing a previous all-time high set in 2022.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
A federal judge is standing by his June decision requiring the U.S. Department of Education torestore the Office for Civil Rights “to the status-quo” so it can “carry out its statutory functions.” The order, which prevents the department from laying off OCR employees, comes despite a U.S. Supreme Court emergency order in a separate case allowing the agency to move forward with mass layoffs across the department.
The case challenging the gutting of OCR, which included the shuttering of seven out of 12 regional OCR offices, was brought by two students who “faced severe discrimination and harassment in school and were depending on the OCR to resolve their complaints so that they could attend public school,” said Judge Myong Joun in his Aug. 13 decision.
The Education Department appealed Joun’s ruling Thursday to the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the court to allow the department to move forward with its OCR closures.
The court battle prolongs the administrative leave of OCR employees that began in March, after the department laid off more than 1,300 staff across the entire Education Department. President Donald Trump and U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon pushed the layoffs as a way to “end bureaucratic bloat” and downsize the federal government, including its expenses.
However, according to American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union representing a majority of the laid-off Education Department employees, the federal government has been paying around $7 million a month just for employees to sit idle on administrative leave.
The employees’ administrative leave that began in March originally ended with their termination on June 9. However, court cases blocking the department’s gutting have prolonged their employment.
According to the numbers released by the agency last year, OCR received a record number of complaints against K-12 and higher education institutions in 2023, the most recent year for which numbers are available, surpassing a previous all-time high set in 2022.
The Office for Civil Rights handles complaints concerning discrimination in federally funded education institutions.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
A federal district court judge refused the Trump administration’s request to vacate a previous ruling that prohibited the Department of Education from laying off nearly half its Office for Civil Rights staff.
The decision was made by Massachusetts judge Myong Joun on Wednesday and involved the case Victim Rights Law Center v. Department of Education. It comes just a month after the Supreme Court reversed a preliminary injunction in a similar case, New York v. McMahon, which Joun also oversaw.
In the new order, the district court judge argues that the cases, and therefore their related rulings, are separate.
The New York case, which was filed by multiple state attorneys general, addressed the reduction in force more broadly, Joun said. By comparison, the Victim Rights Law Center case more specifically addresses the RIF at OCR and how it may hold the office back from completing its statutory mandate of protecting students from discrimination.
So, although the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to continue with the reduction in force broadly, Joun argues, it does not mean the enjoinment of layoffs within OCR is no longer applicable.
Trump officials “present two arguments for why vacatur or a stay are appropriate: first, that the Supreme Court granted the stay in a related case, and second, that the two related cases are ‘indistinguishable in all pertinent respects.’ I am unconvinced by either argument,” Joun wrote. “Although this case and New York are related, I issued a separate Preliminary Injunction Order to address the unique harms that Plaintiffs alleged arose from their reliance on the OCR.”
He also noted that even though the high court judges reversed one preliminary injunction, that does not mean they have made a final ruling on the merit of the RIF.
Finally, Joun went on to say that the defendants’ motion for stay has little standing, as “they have not substantially complied with the preliminary injunction order” in the first place. Reporting from The 74 backs this up, showing that none of the 276 fired OCR employees have been reinstated.
The Office for Civil Rights is investigating five universities for offering scholarships to undocumented students, the Education Department announced Thursday.
The universities of Louisville, Nebraska Omaha, Miami, Michigan, and Western Michigan University have been accused of violating Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination against or otherwise excluding individuals on the basis of race, color, or national origin, in offering the scholarships.
“Neither the Trump Administration’s America first policies nor the Civil Right Act of 1964’s prohibition on national origin discrimination permit universities to deny our fellow citizens the opportunity to compete for scholarships because they were born in the United States,” said Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor in a statement.
Trainor said the department is expanding its enforcement efforts to “protect American students and lawful residents from invidious national origin discrimination.”
The scholarships at issue that allegedly provide exclusionary funding based on national origin include the University of Miami’s U Dreamers Program and University of Michigan’s Dreamer Scholarship.
The investigations are in response to complaints submitted to OCR by the Equal Protection Project (EPP), an initiative from the Legal Insurrection Foundation (LIF), a national free speech advocacy group founded by Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson.
EPP describes itself as “devoted to the fair treatment of all persons without regard to race or ethnicity” and lists as part of its “Vision:2025” “continued OCR complaints” “strategic lawsuits” and “media-narrative setting.”
LIF also runs criticalrace.org, a series of databases cataloguing admissions policies, programming, funding models and other instances of alleged critical race training.
In a statement provided by the department, Jacobson said: “Protecting equal access to education includes protecting the rights of American-born students. At the Equal Protection Project, we are gratified that the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is acting on our complaints regarding scholarships that excluded American-born students.”
The Department of Education also is planning to investigate the colleges for other scholarships detailed in the complaint that provide funding to undergraduate LGBTQ+ students of color, Hispanic students, Native American students, African American students and other underrepresented student groups.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
As public complaints continue to pile up at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency is dismissing them at a pace that is alarming former OCR employees.
From the time of the agency’s reduction in force on March 11 until June 27, OCR dismissed 3,424 complaints, according to court documents filed by Rachel Oglesby, who has been chief of staff at the Education Department since January. By comparison, the office dismissed 2,527 cases in the three-month period between November 2024 and January 2025 under the Biden administration, according to Catherine Lhamon, who led the agency under the last presidency.
A similar contrast can be seen in the agency’s other benchmarks.
The Trump administration’s OCR opened 309 complaints for investigation in the March-June period, compared to 674 during the Biden administration’s final three months between Nov. 1, 2024, and Jan. 1, 2025. The Trump Education Department recently resolved 290 complaints with voluntary agreements, OCR-mediated settlements and technical assistance, while Lhamon said the previous administration, around the same three-month period, resolved 595 through mediation or voluntary resolution alone.
The contrast “reflects a shocking diminution of work output from the office,” Lhamon said by text message on Monday.
“A dismissal rate this high suggests a fundamental shift in how OCR is triaging and processing complaints,” said Jackie Gharapour Wernz, an education civil rights attorney who worked for the OCR under the Obama and first Trump administrations. “It raises serious concerns about whether civil rights issues are being meaningfully evaluated and whether the agency is adhering to its own case processing manual and relevant law in dismissing cases.”
An Education Department spokesperson, however, strongly defended the agency’s work.
In dismissing complaints, OCR is taking actions according to federal law, regulations and the OCR case processing manual, which outlines the steps the agency must take to process complaints, said Julie Hartman, an Education Department spokesperson, in an email to K-12 Dive late Monday.
“OCR has taken unprecedented steps to streamline its functions according to demand,” said Hartman. “OCR’s daily accomplishments under the Trump Administration disprove the rampant fear-mongering by the media” and makes clear that “OCR is vigorously upholding its responsibilities to protect all Americans’ civil rights.”
The high number of case dismissals comes after the department let go of hundreds of its OCR employees and shut down seven of its 12 regional offices. The moves prompted concerns from civil rights advocates that the agency wouldn’t be able to fulfill its duties to protect students — especially those from traditionally marginalized groups.
Those layoffs came amid historic high OCR caseloads, which had prompted the Biden administration to advocate for increased funding to beef up the office’s investigative staff. Lhamon at the time had said investigators were juggling “untenable” caseloads of upward of 40 cases per person.
Since the mass layoffs, existing investigative staff have been juggling nearly double that workload. And the Trump administration has proposed slashing the office’s funding for fiscal year 2026 by $49 million compared to the $140 million appropriated in 2024.
The concerns led to a lawsuit, Victim Rights Law Center v. U.S. Department of Education, filed by Victim Rights Law Center. In a ruling last month, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun said the mass terminations and closure of multiple OCR offices meant the office had “abdicated its enforcement duties” and ordered that OCR be restored to its status quo.
As part of that lawsuit, the department was required to routinely file updates on its progress in restoring the office. The Education Department has stated that despite being required to reintegrate employees into the office per the court order, it intends to appeal the case.
The department has likewise appealed an order requiring the department be restored to its status quo in State of New York v. McMahon, a separate case challenging the upheaval of the entire department as opposed to just OCR.
Following the layoffs in March, Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann indicated changes were being made to OCR’s operations “to better serve American students and families.”
“We are confident that the dedicated staff of OCR will deliver on its statutory responsibilities,” Biedermann said in a March 13 email to K-12 Dive.
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is undergoing a slew of changes, including a significantly increased caseload after the Trump administration let go of hundreds of its employees. With the nomination of Kimberly Richey to fill the role of assistant secretary for civil rights, it’s likely the office tasked with enforcing equal educational access will shift even more.
Right now, attorneys are juggling on average 115 cases, according to Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who shared the number with witnesses at a Thursday nomination hearing held by the Senate’s Health, Education Labor and Pensions Committee.
Prior to the March layoffs that resulted in the shuttering of seven out of 12 OCR offices nationwide, attorneys tasked with protecting the civil rights of students and educators had about 42 cases on their plate. That caseload was characterized as “untenable” by the former assistant secretary for civil rights, Catherine Lhamon, and had prompted former U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to advocate for an increase in the office’s funding under the Biden administration.
Murray said the newer caseload was now “making it difficult for those investigators to meaningfully investigate discrimination and to protect students’ rights.”
Thursday’s hearing was held to discuss the nomination of Richey to lead OCR, among nominations of other officials such as Penny Schwinn to be deputy secretary of education. Richey served under the first Trump administration as acting assistant secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and then as acting assistant secretary for civil rights.
Being ‘strategic’ with resources
When asked by multiple Democratic senators about how she would navigate a backlog of OCR complaints — which exceeds 25,000, said Murray — with half of the office’s former headcount and a budget that would be significantly slashed under President Donald Trump’s FY 26 proposal, Richey said she would have to be “strategic.”
“One of the reasons why this role is so important to me is because I will always advocate for OCR to have the resources to do its job,” said Richey. However, she dodged questions about whether OCR had enough resources to do its job under Trump’s first administration.
“I think that what that means is that I’m going to have to be really strategic if I’m confirmed, stepping into this role, helping come up with a plan where we can address these challenges,” she said.
That would include evaluating the current caseload and determining where complaints stand in their investigative timeline. It would also include looking at the current staff distribution and organizational structure of OCR, and helping Secretary of Education Linda McMahon come up with a plan to “ensure that OCR is able to meet its mission and its statutory purpose to prioritize all complaints.”
Richey said that rather than put certain investigations on pause, as has been the case under the second Trump administration, she would prioritize all complaints that fall at OCR’s footsteps.
Changes in Title IX enforcement
Richey raised the eyebrows of some Republican leaders when she said that she would enforce Title IX, the anti-sex discrimination statute, to protect LGTBQ+ students from discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The Trump administration and Republican leaders have prioritized enforcing the statute to exclude transgender students from women’s and girls’ athletics teams, locker rooms and other facilities.
When pressed, however, Richey clarified that she would enforce Title IX to protect LGTBQ+ students in a narrow number of cases, related to different treatment, bullying and harassment.
“We would also look at the relevance of sex in our cases,” Richey said. “Sex is relevant in regards to restrooms, and sex is relevant in regards to locker rooms and sex is relevant in regards to athletics.”
“That is not what we did under President Trump’s first term, and that is not what we will do under President Trump’s second term,” she said.
Will OCR threats to federal funding continue?
As for whether educational institutions should expect OCR’s threats to federal funding to become the new norm, Richey didn’t give a clear answer.
“I cannot speak to current actions that have been taken by the department,” she said when pressed about whether she would reverse the federal funding cuts made by the administration after short and targeted Title VI investigations related to antisemitism and Title IX investigations related to transgender athletics policies.
Maine, for example, currently faces a cut of up to $864 million in a case referred to the Department of Justice by the Education Department over the state’s athletic policies allowing transgender students to play on girls’ and women’s sports teams. Additional investigations have been opened in Minnesota and California.
In March, the administration also threatened to cut $9 billion in federal funds for Harvard University over what the administration claimed was a failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. By May, it had cut over $450 million in grants from Harvard, revoked its ability to enroll international students, and threatened to cut an additional $3 billion in federal grants.
Such threats have not been empty. Columbia University, for example, lost millions in federal grants and contracts, also over antisemitism investigations that Democratic leaders and some civil rights organizations have called “politically motivated.”
While Richey did not mention whether she supports those pending cuts, she said she believes antisemitism in schools has worsened since her first run at OCR and that there are a number of “tools” to help curb it, including issuing guidance “in a post-Oct. 7 world.”
“The climate is very different than what it was five years ago, four years ago, three years ago,” she said. “I think we look at the Title VI regulations to specifically address antisemitism.”
The HELP committee will schedule a vote on Richey and Schwinn in the coming weeks, after which the nominees will be referred to the full Senate floor for votes.
