Washington Post investigation found Education Dept. froze civil rights probes into school racial, sexual harassment for 18 months

On August 9, 2026, the Washington Post reported that the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) had indefinitely frozen investigations into racial and sexual harassment in schools inherited from the Biden administration, rather than resolving them. Eight current and former OCR employees described being barred from advancing pending racial- and sexual-harassment cases even as the office pursued investigations aligned with the administration's priorities, including transgender athletes' participation in girls' sports, antisemitism on college campuses, and race- or gender-based college scholarship programs; in 2026 the office reached 31 resolution agreements under Title VI, all of them targeting university partnerships with a single scholarship program that recruited Black and Hispanic students to business school. In the 18 months since Trump's second term began, OCR completed only three resolution agreements involving racial harassment and none involving sexual harassment or violence, compared with 72 total resolution agreements in 2024 -- 25 for racial harassment and 47 for sexual harassment or violence -- under the Biden administration.

The freeze followed the administration cutting OCR's staff by more than half and closing seven of its twelve regional offices, which current and former staff said overwhelmed the office charged with enforcing Title VI and Title IX in schools nationwide. Staff said they were told they could technically work on new racial- and sexual-harassment complaints but could not get the headquarters approval needed to advance them, effectively letting cases sit indefinitely; one Cleveland-region case involving a Black middle-school student in Michigan who was repeatedly called racial slurs had reached the settlement-negotiation stage under Biden before that regional office was closed and the case stalled. Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey said in a statement that the office inherited a backlog of roughly 19,000 cases from the Biden administration and disputed that cases were being deliberately allowed to linger, saying the office was "utilizing every tool at our disposal to resolve the backlog."

ProPublica separately reported in February 2025 that the administration had frozen OCR investigations government-wide shortly after taking office and, weeks later, lifted that freeze only for disability-discrimination complaints while continuing to hold race- and gender-discrimination cases -- corroborating that the racial- and sexual-harassment freeze the Post documented in August 2026 began at the start of the administration and had continued, effectively unresolved, for a year and a half.