A striking analysis of federal data has uncovered a complete and unprecedented halt in the enforcement of sexual harassment and assault cases within America’s K-12 schools during the year 2025. An investigation into the U.S. Department of Education’s resolution agreement database confirmed that its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) did not finalize a single resolution agreement for such complaints under Title IX following the start of President Donald Trump’s second term. This startling disappearance of action in a critical area of student protection is not an isolated event but rather the most alarming symptom of a broader, systemic collapse in the agency’s civil rights enforcement activities. The total number of resolution agreements across all civil rights categories plummeted to just 177 in 2025, a dramatic fall from 518 the previous year and the lowest annual total recorded in over a decade. For civil rights experts, education advocates, and concerned parents, this data paints a grim picture of an agency that has seemingly abandoned one of its core missions, leaving student survivors without a crucial federal backstop and raising fundamental questions about the government’s commitment to ensuring safe and equitable learning environments.
A Deliberate Shift in Priorities
The New Political Agenda
The precipitous decline in enforcement is not a result of fewer complaints but rather a calculated pivot in the agency’s priorities, meticulously aligned with the political agenda of the executive branch. Experts observing the OCR’s activities under the second Trump administration have identified a clear and intentional redirection of resources away from traditional Title IX enforcement areas, such as sexual harassment, and toward a narrow set of culturally divisive issues. Kayleigh Baker, a senior supervising consultant for TNG Consulting and a respected Title IX expert, observed that the OCR has undergone a “marked shift” in the types of cases it now aggressively pursues. This new focus directly mirrors executive orders that prohibit transgender students from participating in school athletics and using facilities that correspond with their gender identity. Furthermore, the agency has been tasked with enforcing a sweeping ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives within any program receiving federal funds, a mandate that extends deep into the operations of K-12 public schools nationwide. This strategic realignment represents a fundamental reinterpretation of the OCR’s mission, transforming it from a broad protector of civil rights into an enforcement arm for specific political objectives.
This sharp redirection has been met with condemnation from seasoned civil rights officials and legal advocates, who view the administration’s actions as a dangerous and unlawful dereliction of duty. Catherine Lhamon, who served as the assistant secretary for civil rights during both the Obama and Biden administrations, characterized the new approach as “unprecedented and dangerous and illegal.” She argued that the administration has cherry-picked a few high-profile, politically charged issues for vigorous public enforcement while demonstrating an open “disdain for everything else” that falls under the OCR’s statutory purview. Shiwali Patel, a former OCR attorney and the current senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, underscored the deep irony of this policy shift. Patel noted that while extensive research consistently demonstrates a high prevalence of sex-based harassment and assault impacting students’ ability to learn, the very federal office charged with addressing this crisis is now actively “choosing to ignore that issue.” The consensus among these experts is that the agency is not simply failing to act but is engaged in a conscious effort to dismantle established protections, creating a vacuum where students are left more vulnerable.
Reframing Title IX
Publicly, the Trump administration has framed its concentrated focus on transgender students not as a neglect of Title IX’s other mandates, but as a defense of the rights of women and girls. Julie Hartman, the Education Department’s press secretary for legal affairs, asserted that the agency’s aggressive use of Title IX to prevent transgender students from accessing facilities consistent with their gender identity has “restored commonsense safeguards against sexual violence by returning sex-based separation in intimate facilities.” This narrative has been a consistent theme in the administration’s public messaging, which has centered its Title IX rhetoric almost exclusively on limiting the access of transgender students to sports and school facilities. This reframing effectively sidelines the statute’s long-established role in protecting all students, including survivors of sexual violence, from discrimination that impedes their education. Historically, Title IX has been a critical tool for ensuring that schools provide necessary accommodations for survivors, such as separating them from their alleged perpetrators or granting extensions on academic work, so they can continue to learn in a safe environment. The administration’s new interpretation inverts this purpose, prioritizing exclusion over accommodation and protection.
This ideological inversion has manifested in the agency’s operational priorities, creating a stark contrast in its handling of different types of complaints. While no resolution agreements were reached for sexual harassment cases against women and girls in 2025, the OCR aggressively expedited investigations and proposed agreements designed to curtail the rights of transgender students. The department’s legal argument contended that the very inclusion of these students in female-designated spaces constituted a form of discrimination against their cisgender peers. This approach has left many civil rights advocates, like Shiwali Patel, feeling as if they are living in an “upside-down world.” In contrast, the few non-transgender-related Title IX agreements that were finalized in 2025 addressed what experts describe as minor compliance issues or “low-hanging fruit.” Beth Gellman-Beer, a former OCR regional director, noted that these resolutions involved smaller matters such as the handling of single-sex scholarships, requirements for posting training materials online, and technical adjustments to grievance procedures. These actions, she explained, represent only a “small little piece of Title IX,” failing to address the systemic issues of harassment and assault that affect countless students.
Internal Turmoil and Deflection
Contesting the Data
When presented with the investigation’s findings, the Department of Education did not dispute the complete absence of sexual harassment resolution agreements in 2025 but did challenge the overall case resolution numbers cited from its own public database. A senior department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, claimed that the OCR had actually settled over 300 cases during the year through a combination of resolution agreements and mediation, with more than 200 of those pertaining to K-12 schools. However, this defense conflates two distinct processes. The department’s own definitions characterize mediation as a voluntary, negotiated alternative to its formal investigative and resolution process, which does not carry the same weight or systemic impact as a binding resolution agreement. Critics were quick to point out this distinction. Catherine Lhamon, for instance, found even this higher, combined number of resolutions to be “appalling.” She stated that such a figure was less than half of what a “functioning Office for Civil Rights” would be expected to produce in a typical year, suggesting that even the administration’s own best-case-scenario numbers pointed to a severe drop in productivity and enforcement.
Blame Games and Bureaucratic Chaos
In its official response, the administration attempted to deflect responsibility for the agency’s dramatic slowdown, pointing to a backlog of 20,000 cases it claimed were left by the previous Biden administration. Press Secretary Julie Hartman asserted that the Trump administration had been forced to correct the course of an OCR that the prior administration had “corrupted to drive a transgender ideology into our schools.” This narrative of inheriting a broken system, however, is sharply contested by former OCR employees and civil rights experts. They argue that the primary cause of the dysfunction was not an inherited backlog but rather the administration’s own deliberate actions, which plunged the agency into a state of unprecedented chaos. The office was thrown into turmoil by a sweeping plan for dramatic layoffs that aimed to reduce its headcount by nearly half, a move that paralyzed its operations for months. This led to a prolonged period of profound uncertainty, during which staff members were repeatedly placed on administrative leave and subsequently reinstated based on evolving court orders, effectively grinding the work of investigation and resolution to a halt.
The self-inflicted nature of this operational collapse was later detailed in a U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released in early 2026. The report found that the Education Department had paid OCR employees up to $38 million in salaries during a six-month period of administrative leave. Critically, the GAO concluded that the department could not prove that the layoffs, which were eventually rescinded, had in any way improved the agency’s efficiency or its ability to serve the public. The turmoil raised serious questions about whether a severely understaffed OCR could ever fulfill its statutory obligations. The intended staff reduction would have left the entire national office with only 62 employees, a catastrophic decrease from the 575 it had in the previous fiscal year. This internal disruption, when combined with the clear ideological pivot in enforcement priorities, resulted in what critics have described as a fundamental failure of the agency. It had become incapable of processing, let alone resolving, entire categories of civil rights complaints, thereby undermining the very statutory purpose for which it was created.
