When the Trump administration announced last week that about half the staff of the U.S. Department of Education were to be laid off, the slashing closed down the San Francisco regional branch of the Office for Civil Rights responsible for providing the state’s students protection from discrimination.
The California office handled a bulging caseload of students, families and school staff: alleged unequal academic instruction for disabled students; allegations of campus sexual assault; claims of unfair discipline meted out to students of color; alleged bullying of LGBTQ+ students.
The cases include those alleging reverse discrimination, such as unfair or illegal advantages provided to racial or ethnic minorities.
About 1,500 California cases are pending, according to multiple laid-off attorneys for the Bay Area office, who said they have been largely locked out of case files and email. They can receive messages on cases but were unable to reply after receiving layoff notices, despite being technically employed until March 21.
The pending cases include open investigations, those that are in mediation, resolved cases under monitoring to ensure agreements are kept, and complaints being researched by civil rights attorneys, which had yet to be acted on.
It is uncertain what will happen to that caseload and ongoing litigation. Six other regional offices were shut down: Dallas, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Four will remain open: Seattle, Denver, Kansas City and Washington, D.C.
“The department has hundreds of fewer staff now than what it needs to effectively do its work. People who file claims will not receive timely resolutions,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led the Office for Civil Rights under Presidents Obama and Biden. Throughout the country, “many millions of students will now not enjoy the civil rights protections that Congress has guaranteed them.”
About a third of the California office’s work involved fielding inquiries or providing training — so that parents, students, teachers and administrators could understand their legal rights and options for pursuing a case, said San Francisco office staff members. Questions about civil rights issues often came in via email or phone, lawyers said, and they aimed to resolve them without drawn-out investigations or legal action.
Still, the 50-person Bay Area-based staff was dealing with a growing caseload despite a gradual 25% downsizing over the last two decades.
The layoffs last week were immediately challenged in court as illegal and as endangering vital services. The administration contends that students will not be shortchanged.
“The Office for Civil Rights will continue to investigate complaints and vigorously enforce federal civil rights laws,” said Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the Education Department. The layoff process, she added, will abide by federal rules as well as employees’ union contract.
Newly confirmed Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said, too, that essential and legally required duties would be carried out. She also defended President Trump’s unfolding plan to shut down the Department of Education and transfer some of its functions elsewhere. “He’s taken the bureaucracy out of education so that more money flows to the states,” McMahon said in a Fox News interview on Tuesday night.
The narrative from the inside
Recent and current staff members of the Office for Civil Rights describe an operation in disarray since the Trump administration assumed control on Jan. 20 — with discrimination cases being frozen or neglected and the immediate shifting of priorities.
It’s common, they said, for a new administration to pause agency actions while it puts new appointees and priorities in place. But in the past, including in the previous Trump administration, there have been judicious exceptions.
When Biden came into office, for example, “our standard disability cases were not frozen. Those kept moving, right? They’re not politicized, so they can just keep going,” said Katie Dullum, a former deputy director who resigned March 7 from her post with the Washington office.
There also were exceptions that could be granted for an especially vulnerable student or for a case that needed to be resolved quickly. And during an administration transition, staff could communicate with families, alerting them of delays or adjusted timelines, she said.
In recent weeks, however, anxiety has surged among those with pending cases, attorneys said.
“We’d get emails from parents in these last weeks. They’d say, ‘Are you still looking at my case about my middle school student being harassed because of their race’ or ‘my child who isn’t receiving their special education accommodations?’” said one San Francisco civil rights office attorney, who was not authorized to be interviewed and requested anonymity. “There could be parents saying their kids have suicidal ideation. And we could not reply.”
Most freezes lifted after McMahon’s Senate confirmation.
However on Friday the National Center for Youth Law filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of students and families across the country who seek to reverse the Education Department’s “recent decision to effectively stop investigating civil rights complaints.”
“To abandon thousands of claims, while our schools are seeing increased bullying, harassment and discrimination, not only goes against the very mission of the Department of Education, it sends a chilling message that schools don’t need to foster an environment in which every student is safe and welcome,” said Shakti Belway, executive director of the youth law organization.
Many Southern California cases that were resolved during the Biden administration are supposed to be under monitoring but have been left to languish, said several current attorneys in the California office, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
A department spokesperson sought to allay concerns, saying the offices will be able to work through cases more quickly with a “rapid resolution process” that allows some steps in a case to be expedited or skipped.
Insiders said rapid resolution is not new — and the department can’t force those involved in a case to agree to it. It works best in a straightforward, simple case, they said.
The workload needs to be examined, said Neal McCluskey, director of Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute.
“The Department of Education is almost certainly too large and staff reductions are probably prudent everywhere,” McCluskey said. “We have also seen OCR [the Office for Civil Rights] expand investigations in the past well beyond specific complaints to investigating entire institutions, greatly and unnecessarily expanding workloads. It would be very surprising if there weren’t many ways to make OCR more efficient.”
One San Francisco office attorney agreed — to a degree. “In the past, we have been told to take on these huge cases when it’s likely a matter of specific bullying and not an entire school or district that has a systemic issue,” the attorney said. “It’s not that things could not be done better. But they will be worse when we’re all gone.”
Shift in priorities
The Trump administration has emphasized new priorities — including a focus on antisemitism. Antisemitism falls under the federally protected category of discrimination based on “shared ancestry.” Shared ancestry also includes Islamophobia.
“In our office, we never felt the pressure directly to pursue one kind of discrimination over the other, even in the last two months,” said a San Francisco attorney. “But it was very clear what the priorities were in Washington, D.C. They were to focus on antisemitism while ignoring Arabs and Muslims. To protect one group but not the other is not a fair and equal application of the law.”
It’s not uncommon for policy directives to change from one administration to the next: Obama focused on the rights of victims of college sexual assault; Trump redirected efforts to make sure those accused of assault had due process. Biden made LGBTQ+ students a group that must be protected from discrimination and afforded equal access; the current Trump administration wants gender cases viewed through the lens of two sexes only: male and female.
The rule-making process is lengthy, resulting in one administration essentially having to enforce the rules of the previous administration — a process that Trump’s team appears prepared to sidestep in his second term by issuing executive orders.
Problems before Trump
Even before the new administration took office, there was a serious backlog of cases. Some cases took years to conclude, including one involving shared ancestry discrimination allegations at the University of California that opened in 2022 and closed out in December.
Trump has not singled out the Office for Civil Rights, but accused federal employees in general — and without evidence — of not doing their jobs and not showing up for work.
McMahon said in an interview last week that, “When I got there … I said, ‘OK, we have to identify where the bloat is, where the bureaucracy is, and let’s start.’”
She added that “so many of the programs are really excellent” and the layoffs would not be harmful because “we wanted to make sure that we kept all of the right people, the good people, to make sure that the outward facing programs, the grants, the appropriations that come from Congress, all of that are being met and none of that’s going to fall through the cracks.”
Attorneys reject the negative characterizations of their work, saying their caseloads had doubled and tripled over the last 10 years, especially as the office became more politicized at the top and better known, resulting in more inquiries and claims.
Democrats also have had complaints. Activists in Los Angeles were outraged when the office told the L.A. Unified School District that its Black Student Achievement Plan — set up to help the district’s lowest-achieving racial group — had to be open to all students. The federal attorneys advised the district that recent Supreme Court rulings, which ordered an end to racial preferences, offered no alternative.
Ken Marcus, who led the department’s civil rights office under President George W. Bush and during Trump’s first term, said that the staff reductions could result in fewer cases being pursued. Instead the office might pursue aggressive high-profile actions, such as the administration’s recent halting of $400 million in federal contracts from multiple agencies to Columbia University over antisemitism allegations. UCLA, UC Berkeley and USC also are undergoing federal scrutiny over alleged antisemitism.
Separately, “there could be increased civil rights enforcement at a state level,” Marcus added.
The deluge of cases, however, suggest that states have not been able or have not been willing to carry out civil rights enforcement. Nor can most families afford lawyers for this sort of legal challenge, Dullum said.
“This is a free resource that’s available to ensure that their student and family rights are protected,” she said. “Without that, they have very few, if any, other options.”
