The Education Department resolved roughly 30 percent fewer complaints of discrimination in American schools last year than in 2024 amid a Trump administration overhaul of civil rights enforcement, the sharpest year-to-year decline in more than three decades, according to government data obtained by The New York Times.
The drop came despite a record number of students seeking help from Washington to confront claims of prejudice, bias and bigotry in schools, according to the 2025 budget request from the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
The slowdown has left about 20,000 students awaiting word from the government about the status of their claims, according to the data, which is maintained by the Education Department. The slower pace raises questions about whether the Trump administration’s pursuit of severe cuts to the department’s civil rights staff has hampered its ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
Education Department officials blamed the slowdown, in part, on what they described as a significant backlog of unresolved cases left by the Biden administration. Attempts to clear those cases last year were also partially slowed by a 43-day government shutdown, administration officials said.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon may provide more insight on Tuesday, when she is scheduled to testify to a Senate appropriations subcommittee that controls her department’s budget. The White House has proposed a 35 percent cut for the Education Department’s civil rights office next year, including a 49 percent reduction in staff, from 530 workers to 271. Ms. McMahon has said a more efficient staff could meet the department’s statutory duties.
Some of Ms. McMahon’s testimony on Tuesday may detail a recent restructuring of the civil rights office. The changes, overseen by Kimberly M. Richey, the department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, were meant to increase efficiency by creating investigative teams dedicated solely to disability- and race-based complaints, instead of relying solely on a regional approach, a senior official at the Education Department said.
Senate Democrats were briefed last week on the findings of a report from the office of Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who examined the sharp decline in resolved complaints.
The report, published on Tuesday, found that in 2025, the civil rights office negotiated the fewest anti-discrimination settlements with schools since the Education Department began posting the deals online in 2014.
These legally binding deals, known as resolution agreements, are typically the final product of extensive investigations, outlining clear steps for schools to remedy civil rights violations and avoid potential cuts to federal funding.
President Trump’s administration secured 112 of these agreements in 2025, compared with an average of 818 per year during his first term, according to the report.
At the start of 2025, 12,000 cases were pending in the civil rights office, meaning the administration’s 112 resolution agreements last year provided enforceable relief to students in less than 1 percent of investigations, the report found. In 15 states, no resolution agreements were reached last year.
Earlier this month the Education Department’s civil rights office canceled six resolution agreements negotiated by previous administrations, a move that Democratic and Republican lawyers said was without precedent.
Mr. Sanders said the report showed the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Education Department, which he described as illegal, “have been a disaster for students and families.”
“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,” Mr. 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.”
Amelia Joy, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the civil rights office was no longer focused on “pandering to an extreme ideology.” (President Joseph R. Biden Jr. attempted to expand protections for transgender students while in office, but those efforts were struck down by a federal judge in Kentucky days before Mr. Trump took office.)
“The prior administration failed our students, but we are utilizing every tool at our disposal to resolve the backlog and return common sense to our schools,” Ms. Joy said.
A senior official in the Education Department said the Biden administration left a backlog of nearly 20,000 civil rights complaints, compared with 4,200 cases left by the first Trump administration, according to the civil rights office’s 2020 annual report.
The official said it was unfair to compare the number of resolved cases in the first year of one administration to the last year of another, saying priorities typically change along with leadership.
But the first year of other administrations have not produced similarly drastic declines. The civil rights office in the first years of the administrations of Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton all resolved roughly the same number of complaints as the last years of their predecessors. During the first year of Mr. Trump’s first administration, for example, department officials said they resolved about 85 percent more complaints than the final year of the Obama administration, according to annual reports.
Democrats have said that the department’s attempt to fire half of its Office for Civil Rights staff appeared to be a significant reason behind the drop in production.
From March to December last year, about a quarter of the $140 million budget for the civil rights office was paid to investigators while they were barred from working, a consequence of lawsuits that challenged the firings, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan auditing arm of Congress.
The Education Department’s broad investigatory powers have been a cornerstone of Congress’s guarantee of equal educational opportunity and one of the most coercive tools to remedy violations of civil rights based on age, color, disability, national origin, race and sex.
Discrimination complaints are typically filed by parents, students or education groups. The executive branch can also open investigations into any school, college or educational institution that received federal funding.
Over the past decade, about half of discrimination complaints were filed on behalf of disabled students, according to annual reports from the civil rights office. Discrimination complaints based on race, national origin and sex account for the rest.
The decline in resolutions comes as Mr. Trump has prevailed in rapidly revamping federal investigative targets to align with his political priorities. Those goals include pursuing allegations of anti-white discrimination in schools and stamping out existing protections for transgender students.
“We absolutely are fulfilling all of our statutory requirements — have not failed to do any of those,” Ms. McMahon told senators in June. “Not only are we reducing the backload, but we are keeping up with what’s coming in now with a reduced staff because we’re doing it efficiently.”
Michael C. Bender is a Times correspondent in Washington.
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