Trump gutted the office that protected America’s most vulnerable students

The phone rang in a regional office of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. On the other end was a mother whose daughter had been sexually assaulted by a classmate. The school had done nothing. The girl was afraid to return to class.

The mother had filed a complaint months earlier. She was calling to check on its status.

There was no answer. The regional office had been closed. The staff had been fired. The case file existed somewhere in a digital void, assigned to no one.

That mother’s story is not an exception. According to a report released Tuesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who serves as ranking member of the Senate HELP Committee, it is the rule.

The Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has produced the least productive enforcement year in more than a decade.

In 2025, the office reached just 112 resolution agreements—legally binding commitments requiring schools to fix civil rights violations.

That is a 78 percent drop from the 507 such agreements reached in 2024, despite an identical $140 million budget and a comparable caseload of nearly 12,000 pending cases.

Worse: The office reached zero resolution agreements for students facing sexual harassment, sexual violence, seclusion, restraint, racial harassment or discriminatory school discipline. That is not a typo. Zero. Not one.

“Every child in America should be able to go to school safely and be treated with dignity,” Sanders said. “Unfortunately, this report makes clear that the Trump administration’s illegal efforts to dismantle the Education Department have been a disaster for students and families across this country.”

The Office for Civil Rights is not some obscure bureaucracy. It is the federal law enforcement agency charged with protecting 65.3 million students from discrimination based on race, sex, disability, color, national origin and age.

When a child with a disability is denied the education they are legally entitled to, they call OCR. When a girl is sexually harassed and the school does nothing, she calls OCR.

When a Jewish student faces antisemitic taunts or a Muslim student faces Islamophobic threats, and the school looks away, they call OCR.

Congress created this office because it decided that the federal government has an obligation to enforce civil rights in America’s schools. That obligation, the report finds, has been abandoned.

The damage was not accidental. It was planned.

In March 2025, Education Secretary Linda McMahon fired 299 of OCR’s 575 staff members and shuttered seven of its 12 regional offices. Courts intervened and forced the administration to rescind the firings. But the message had been sent. The investigators who remained were barred from doing their jobs for months. The office has never recovered.

The cost to taxpayers: up to $38 million paid to investigators who were not allowed to work. The cost to students: incalculable.

Consider the numbers. At the start of 2025, OCR had 11,985 pending civil rights cases. By the end of the year, it had reached resolution agreements in just 112 of them. That is 1 percent. The other 99 percent of students who filed complaints either received dismissals, entered nonbinding mediations or simply waited in limbo.

In 15 states and Puerto Rico, OCR reached zero resolution agreements. Not one. In Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont and Wisconsin, students with pending cases received no enforceable relief.

Students with disabilities, who account for the largest share of OCR complaints, fared particularly badly. The office reached 78.7 percent fewer disability discrimination resolution agreements in 2025 than in 2024.

In cases involving seclusion and restraint—the physical immobilization of children, often with disabilities—OCR reached zero resolution agreements despite 172 pending cases. Not a single school was held accountable last year for physically restraining a child.

The report also found that OCR failed to secure any resolution agreements protecting girls and women facing sexual harassment or sexual violence. There were 777 pending sexual harassment cases and 334 pending sexual violence cases. Zero resolution agreements.

A mother in Michigan whose seventh-grade daughter developed memory loss after epileptic seizures had negotiated a mediation agreement with Detroit Public Schools requiring outside tutoring. When the district stopped replying and the Trump administration shut down the regional office handling Michigan cases, the family had nowhere to turn.

In Pennsylvania, a school district that had entered a resolution agreement with OCR to address a racially hostile environment reported that every email sent to OCR since January 2025 bounced back unanswered. A climate survey required by the agreement was never approved. It was never administered.

The contrast with Trump’s own first term is stark. In 2017, OCR entered into 818 resolution agreements on average per year. In 2025, that number fell to 112—a 91 percent drop for disability cases, a 94.7 percent drop for Title VI racial discrimination cases and a 77.9 percent drop for Title IX sex discrimination cases.

This is the same agency, the same laws, the same budget. The only difference is that in 2025, McMahon decided to fire half the staff and close most of the regional offices.

The administration has argued that dismantling the Education Department is about efficiency and returning power to states and localities.

But the report suggests a different motive. When a federal civil rights enforcement agency stops enforcing civil rights, the people who suffer are the ones who have always suffered: students with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault, children of color, and religious minorities.

Not every case results in a resolution agreement. Some complaints lack merit. Some schools voluntarily comply. But the scale of the collapse—from 507 binding agreements in 2024 to 112 in 2025, from meaningful relief in 5 percent of pending cases to just 1 percent—cannot be explained by caseload or budget. It can only be explained by intent.

The report also found that McMahon allowed $14.2 million of OCR’s fiscal year 2025 budget to expire rather than spend it on enforcement.

That is more than 10 percent of the office’s entire appropriation. Instead of hiring investigators or processing cases, the administration simply let the money lapse.

In the 25 states and Puerto Rico where regional offices were closed, just 0.5 percent of pending cases were resolved through resolution agreements. In states where offices remained open, the rate was 1.6 percent. Still abysmal, but three times higher.

For the students waiting—the girl who was assaulted, the boy who cannot read because the school refuses to provide his legally required accommodations, the family that fled religious persecution only to find the same hatred in an American classroom—the difference between 0.5 percent and 1.6 percent is academic. They are still waiting. Their calls still go unanswered.

The Sanders report is not a partisan document in the usual sense. It does not speculate. It does not extrapolate. It simply adds what the administration did—the firings, the closures, the lapsing funds—and subtracts what the office produced. The remainder is tens of thousands of students left without the protection of federal law.

“When a child with a disability is denied the education they are entitled to, when a student faces racial or sexual harassment—they turn to the Office for Civil Rights for help,” Sanders said. “Yet the Trump administration has decimated this office. As a result, tens of thousands of students facing discrimination have been left with no recourse. That is beyond unacceptable.”

The office still exists, technically. The staff who remain still draw paychecks. The phone lines are still connected, though in seven regions, there is no one to answer them. But an office that does not enforce civil rights is not an office.

It is a facade. And the students who need it are learning a hard lesson about what happens when a government decides that some rights are not worth the trouble of protecting.