Racism, according to Merriam-Webster, includes “the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another.” By that definition, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which by law could not protect Christians from religious discrimination and by practice deprioritized complaints from white students for decades, qualified as racism, funded with public monies.
On June 16, 2026, the Trump administration moved it out.
The Department of Education announced it is transferring some functions of OCR to the Department of Justice and transferring the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) to the Department of Health and Human Services. Under the interagency agreement, OCR retains management and leadership in accordance with federal law, but DOJ will take on investigations, potential resolutions, and student privacy enforcement.
Officials said the transfer “will not impact students, parents, or families,” and that anyone who believes discrimination has occurred in an education program may still file complaints with OCR.
The transfer is the latest step in the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the Education Department, whose closure President Donald Trump has vowed but cannot execute without an act of Congress. Congress created the department and no legislation to close it has advanced, as both parties say there is not enough support.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has instead relied on interagency agreements to transfer functions to other parts of the federal government, effectively shrinking the department’s footprint. These actions are being taken lawfully under presidential powers and do not require congressional approval.
CR’s documented record of selective enforcement begins with its jurisdiction, which covers race, color, national origin, sex, disability, and age, but not religion. By statute, Christians had no avenue through OCR to file religious discrimination complaints. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which OCR enforces, explicitly omitted religious discrimination; an original draft of Title VI included it, and Congress removed it. Religious discrimination in public schools falls instead under Title IV, enforced by the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, not OCR.
OCR only addressed religion only when discrimination overlapped with race or national origin, and in practice applied that narrowly to post-9/11 cases involving Arab Muslim, Sikh, and Jewish students.
Under the Biden administration, OCR directed its resources toward four primary initiatives: mandating DEI programs in schools and universities; requiring schools to allow biological males who identify as female access to girls’ bathrooms, locker rooms, and sports teams under Title IX; investigating schools over disproportionate discipline of minority students regardless of conduct, warning districts they could lose federal funding if suspension rates were racially unrepresentative even when disciplinary codes were race-neutral; and protecting race-conscious admissions programs until the Supreme Court struck them down in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023. Conservative students, straight students, and white students filed complaints during this period but were not the recipients of directed enforcement action.
On race, white students were legally eligible to file complaints but were not an enforcement priority. The Biden administration did not act on a complaint filed in August 2024 alleging the Ithaca, New York, school district excluded white students from a Students of Color Summit for four consecutive years, requiring registering students to acknowledge it was a “Student of Color ONLY event.” The Trump administration opened an investigation within days of taking office.
The Biden OCR’s historic enforcement priorities, race, gender, national origin, and disability, did not, in practice, produce a record of relief for white students filing reverse-discrimination complaints.
At the time of the transfer, OCR had already been largely gutted by the trump administration. Approximately half of OCR’s 575 staff had already been placed on paid administrative leave and closed seven of its 12 regional offices in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, and San Francisco. A Government Accountability
The Government Accountability Office report released in February 2026 claimed that placing the employees on leave may have cost up to $38 million in salaries and benefits paid to employees who were not working from March to December 2025. While the math checks out, the cost would have been the same had they remained at work. The administrative leave strategy was not unique to OCR. Across multiple agencies, the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the federal workforce through direct terminations were challenged in court, with Democratic lawmakers supporting the legal actions blocking the firings.
Placing employees on administrative leave became the administration’s primary tool for gutting agency operations while litigation proceeded, with termination of those employees the presumed next step once legal obstacles are resolved.
From March to September 2025, OCR received more than 9,000 discrimination complaints and dismissed roughly 90 percent of them. Critics have attributed the dismissal rate to staffing reductions. The GAO’s own data undermines that claim: OCR’s dismissal rate was already 81 percent during Trump’s first term, before any of the current staffing reductions.
The more plausible explanation is a change in enforcement standards: complaints that qualified under Biden’s definitions of discrimination, pronoun use, sex-separated bathrooms,and absence of LGBT messaging in schools, no longer meet the threshold under Trump’s revised standards and are dismissed on intake.
Critics have claimed that the Trump administration is following the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 as the blueprint for transferring civil rights enforcement to the DOJ and special education to HHS. Lindsey Burke, who authored the education chapter of Project 2025, is a senior official at the Education Department. The overlap between Project 2025’s proposals and the administration’s actions is real, but that does not prove causation. Every government official arrives with prior associations, prior employers, and prior opinions.
Rachel Gittleman, president of AFGE Local 252, the union representing Education Department employees, said the transfers will leave vulnerable students “without the services they need and without protection when they face discrimination.” “This isn’t efficiency — it’s chaos,” Gittleman added.
Gittleman’s claim is not supported by evidence. Moving OCR to the Department of Justice and OSERS to the Department of Health and Human Services cuts no one out of education. There is no evidence that enrollment in schools has dropped or that children no longer qualify for school as a result. There have also been no reported cases of “chaos.” These are liberal talking points coming from the same people who classify the statement “there are only two genders” as violence.
To be fair, by that definition incidents of violence have probably increased, with conviction rates dropping at the same time. Meanwhile, incidents of real violence in liberal cities increased during the Biden administration while convictions dropped. Since Trump resumed office, he has been fighting multiple legal battles to deploy the National Guard and police the streets in liberal cities where violence was off the charts despite the presence of gender pronouns and pride flags.
At the same time, moving the investigative functions of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice means that Christian parents and students will get more justice in public schools.
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