Civil Rights Office Resolved 1% of Cases in 2025

In the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights reached the lowest number of resolution agreements in over a decade, according to a new report from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who is the ranking member on the Senate education committee.

OCR reached just 112 resolution agreements—which are used to settle civil rights complaints against schools and lay out steps the institution must take to remedy the situation—in 2025, representing just 1 percent of all pending cases. The office resolved no cases pertaining to sexual harassment, sexual violence or racial harassment, including claims of antisemitism or Islamophobia. According to the report, over 2,000 cases are currently pending across those three categories.

The number of disability discrimination cases that were resolved also dropped from 390 in 2024 to 83 last year.

The report comes more than a year after the Trump administration fired half of OCR’s staff and closed seven of its 12 regional offices. Since then, experts and former OCR employees have warned that the diminished OCR would struggle to address civil rights complaints and protect students at K–12 schools and in higher education from harm. (Some employees were subsequently rehired late last year when the department rescinded the layoffs.) The office has reportedly been ordered to focus its efforts on Trump’s priorities, which has led to more investigations into schools that allow transgender girls and women to play on women’s sports teams.

The Government Accountability Office previously found that OCR dismissed more than 70 percent of the 9,000 complaints received from March 11 to Sept. 23, 2025.

The decline in resolution agreements is also a significant departure from Trump’s first term, when, according to the report, 818 cases were resolved each year on average, a record high for the department.

“The facts of this report are damning and make clear that the Trump administration has turned the Office for Civil Rights—an agency created to protect the most vulnerable students in America—into a tool for political persecution rather than student protection,” the report argues. “Any child in America should be able to go to school safely and be treated with dignity regardless of their race, disability, or sex. The Trump administration has broken that promise. That is a betrayal of every student, every parent, and every working person in America and it must end.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon faced sharp questions from Democrats about the report’s findings during a Tuesday appearance before a Senate subcommittee on appropriations. She noted that “there was a time when we were not processing cases as quickly as we should, but we are now focused on that and moving forward with the expertise.” She added that the department is hiring more lawyers to work at OCR.

In response to a question from Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, she claimed that the department’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2027 is “a budget of increasing dollars for civil rights.” The budget slashes OCR’s funding by 35 percent.

‘Harmed’ by ‘Disastrous Decisions’

Civil rights advocates and experts say they’re concerned by the findings in the report.

“The number that appeared again and again in the analysis was ‘zero,’ highlighting exactly how much work the Trump administration is doing to protect our students. Girls, students of color, students with disabilities, student athletes, student survivors of sexual violence, and LGBTQI+ students have all been harmed by Secretary McMahon’s disastrous decisions, including OCR unlawfully imposing the Trump administration’s extremist political agenda,” Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement.

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, Beth Gellman-Beer, the former head of OCR’s Philadelphia field office and a partner at Evergreen Education Solutions, said the finding that no sexual assault or harassment resolutions had been reached was “sobering,” especially in light of the Trump administration’s repeated assertion that it is prioritizing the safety of women and girls in schools.

However, she noted that OCR is currently hiring to fill vacancies in its remaining regional offices, which she finds encouraging.

“While the report is a stark reminder of the diminishment of OCR’s capacity since January 2025—and the horrifying impact on students we are supposed to serve—I remain hopeful that OCR will begin functioning better when those hires are in place,” she wrote.

Brett Sokolow, board chair at TNG Consulting, a civil rights consultancy, and the Association of Title IX Administrators, said he felt the report represents natural changes in how different administrations view civil rights enforcement.

“This ebb and flow of OCR attention and priorities has been a recurring theme over my 26 years of practice. It’s not new, and not surprising. Each administration focuses on what it deems important and de-emphasizes that which it wishes to minimize,” he wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “The near total abandonment of sexual harassment resolutions is perhaps happening to a degree that we have not seen since before 2011, but what is notable is that when ebbs in OCR attention occur, that often catalyzes a turn to litigation, instead, because OCR is not a viable remedial outlet. That’s exactly what’s happened, and the level of litigation involving ADA/504, Title IX, Title VI aimed at colleges and K–12 schools is the highest I have ever seen it, even given limits on damages that now pertain to some federal civil rights suits.”