But in January of this year, shortly after Trump was sworn in, the Energy Department abruptly froze investigations into thousands of cases of alleged racial and gender discrimination, including one involving Blunt's son. Linda McMahon, Trump's education secretary, lifted the moratorium in March. A week later, the Department of Energy announced that it was closing seven of OCR's twelve regional offices and laying off about half of its approximately five hundred and fifty employees as part of a broader “downsizing” at the agency. In response, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit legal organization Public Justice and attorneys at Glenn Agre Bergman & Fuentes sued the Energy Department, arguing that the drastic cuts would make it impossible for the agency to meet its statutory obligations to enforce civil rights laws and deprive discriminated children across the country of “a meaningful path to relief.” One of the plaintiffs in the case was Tara Blunt, who by this point had withdrawn her son from public school and enrolled him in a private academy, despite the financial burden this placed on her family. “I felt like we had no choice, for his physical safety and his mental health,” she told me recently. “Every day he would come home and say, 'They laughed at my hair,' 'they called me that,' 'they called me that.' He would say, “My heart hurts,” or “I can’t stand it anymore.” »
Victims of racist bullying are not the only children harmed by OCR's destruction. Another plaintiff in the lawsuit filed by Public Justice is Karen Josephoski, a Troy, Michigan, resident whose 10-year-old son has a severe, potentially life-threatening allergy to dairy. In 2023, this condition, classified as a disability, has made him the target of insults and ridicule. “Allergies are stupid!” – exclaimed one student, pouring milk for Josefoski's son's lunch. Another time, a group of students tackled him to the ground, placed a paper cheese crown on his head, and then taunted him with real cheese. Because her son's allergy could be caused by simple contact with dairy products and because the harassment continued despite her complaints, Josefoski's pediatrician advised her to keep him at home. She decided to remove him from school and then filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights, which handles thousands of disability cases each year. After reviewing the evidence, a thick folder of documents that Josefoski had collected, OCR investigators told her that her son's case was a failure. “They said, 'Your case is so clear—it's one of the simplest cases we've ever seen,'” she recalls.
Following OCR's intervention, the school agreed to mediation. But after Trump was elected, the agency stopped responding to Josephoski's emails and mediation efforts stalled. Josefoski and her husband, Glenn, consulted with a private attorney who confirmed their concerns, namely that the closure of OCR's regional offices had resulted in the dismissal of their son's case. (Attorney Elizabeth Abdnour told me that an OCR representative told her that, essentially, “nothing is happening right now—we're closed.”) Last spring, Karen Josephoski, a teacher, began homeschooling her son, which she says has prevented him from falling behind academically but she knows cannot provide him with the social benefits that going to school can provide. “He has no community,” she said through tears. Her son, she added, was so shaken by the persecution that he began trying to hide his allergy, which could have jeopardized his safety. “He was traumatized,” she said.
In May and June, a U.S. district court issued duplicate injunctions that halted DOE cuts and ordered it to rehire fired OCR employees. But the Trump administration delayed implementation of the orders, reinstating only eighty-five of the laid-off workers while appealing the decisions. On September 29, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit stayed an injunction specifically targeting OCR, citing an emergency Supreme Court ruling that granted the Trump administration permission to proceed with massive layoffs at the Department of Energy. Two weeks ago, eighty-five OCR investigators who had been reinstated were fired again, including a senior manager who called the second firing a gut punch. (On Tuesday, a judge issued a preliminary injunction in a similar case, although it remains unclear how the ruling will affect OCR's latest wave of layoffs.) Like Karen Josephoski, the senior manager has a son with a disability, and she expressed concern that parents of children like her own now have no way to protect them from abuse. “My child has been harassed in the past because of his disability,” she said. “I think about what he would have done if I hadn't had the experience that I have. This is what parents will be left with, especially people who don't have the resources to file a claim. The most vulnerable will suffer the most.”
Until recently, the complaints investigated by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Civil Rights came primarily from students and families who came to the agency voluntarily to report harm—people like Karen Josephoski and Tara Blunt. Under Trump, the focus has shifted to internal investigations, such as the announcement in March that forty-five universities across the country were being targeted for their “racially exclusionary” graduate programs. All of the universities on the list—Duke, Cornell, Emory, George Mason—were under investigation for discrimination allegedly suffered by white students due to DEI efforts. Most recently, OCR threatened to cut federal funding for public schools in New York, Chicago and Northern Virginia if they did not stop providing transgender and nonbinary students with access to restrooms and athletic programs that match their identities, which the administration said was a violation of Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education programs. (In August, school boards in Fairfax and Arlington counties sued the Department of Education, noting that several courts had ruled that Title IX requires providing such access to transgender students. A district judge dismissed their cases, but the school districts subsequently appealed the decision.) The administration also launched an unprecedented campaign to punish universities for allegedly failing to combat anti-Semitism on campuses where protests against the Gaza war took place, accusing them of jeopardizing the safety of Jewish students who were singled out for protections that members of other groups apparently do not deserve.
The targeted investigations that now dominate OCR's agenda are “purely political,” a fired senior manager told me. Some conservatives argue that this agenda Always was partisan, shaped by the woke ideology of the Democrats. But is protecting children with disabilities from discrimination really a partisan issue? Or an investigation into schools that failed to protect teenage girls from abuse? “Access to a sense of safety in an educational environment is not a partisan issue,” said Amanda Walsh, associate director of external affairs at the Victims' Rights Law Center, a nonprofit that represents victims of sexual assault, including students who have experienced Title IX violations such as sexual harassment and assault. (The center is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by Public Justice Services against the Department of Energy.) “Sexual violence is not a partisan issue,” Walsh continued. “The clients we serve are both Democrats and Republicans, and the majority of them are children and students. I think the safety of our children in K-12 schools and students in universities is one of the few values that many people can agree on.”
