President Donald Trump’s decision to gut the federal office charged with protecting students from discrimination is creating new responsibilities for states that aren’t ready to take them up.
Amid mass layoffs of government employees and Trump's efforts to dismantle the Education Department, the agency shuttered seven of its 12 regional Office for Civil Rights branches that families turned to when they felt their rights were violated. That pullback is starting to expose the gaps students will have to navigate after states spent decades shaping their anti-discrimination policies assuming the federal government would handle it.
Some states, including Maryland and Pennsylvania, have well-funded civil rights commissions capable of investigating complaints but don’t have the authority to step in. And many state education agencies, like those in Mississippi and in Arizona, are directing families to take discrimination complaints to the federal government.
Trump has tied the moves to his quest to return "education back to the states where it belongs" — a theme visible in other areas the federal government has traditionally taken responsibility for, like disaster relief. But the existing patchwork of state-level enforcement powers against discrimination risks leaving some students without protection.
“The problem is that now your ability to get relief is now contingent on your ZIP code,” said Beth Gellman-Beer, a former Philadelphia regional OCR office director who has worked at the agency under Democratic and Republican administrations. “It really depends on what kind of state agencies exist in the state that you live in, whether they're resourced, whether they even exist.”
In Pennsylvania, for example, the state’s human rights commission enforces civil rights law and investigates accusations of discrimination but has been focused on housing-related cases.
“We have never been in this situation,” said Democratic state Sen. Lindsey Williams. “We have had an office of civil rights at a federal level enforcing students rights for decades. So for that to all of a sudden be gone, you have to think a little creatively about how we can respond to it.”
Williams is pushing a bill that would create a new state agency to investigate civil rights complaints in schools. Her measure, which faces an uphill battle with the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania Senate, resembles legislation in Maryland, in Georgia and in Colorado, where states are grappling with a similar mismatch over state and federal authority on school-based discrimination.
But supporters of the Trump administration’s education agenda reject concerns that states can’t handle the responsibility of protecting students from discrimination.
“Why would the states not be able to do it? They are very capable people, they care about their population, they're accountable to their population and they'll take the resources, innovate and do the right thing,” said Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah), who chairs the House higher education subcommittee. “This will be much more effective with the states than somebody here in D.C. … The power should be going down to the state. The funds should be there and let them do their job.”
This shift is also happening as civil rights enforcement has plummeted over the last year, with the federal office resolving zero cases of sexual harassment, two cases of racial discrimination and fewer disability complaints compared to the first year of the first Trump administration, according to a minority staff report released in April by the Senate HELP Committee.
The Trump administration has started to resolve more discrimination cases in 2026 than it did in 2025. At the same time, it has largely deployed the Education Department’s civil rights office in ways that align with the president’s political agenda. That includes investigating Harvard University and other schools over alleged antisemitism on campus. The office has also probed schools over policies allowing transgender women and children to access bathrooms, locker rooms and dormitories and participate in women’s and girls sports.
Civil rights groups are urging states to bolster their enforcement now, especially because it's unclear when or if the federal office will go back to the work it has been doing for decades. These advocates say more families are turning to them for help even as they warn they cannot fully fill the gap.
Former Justice Department officials now at the National Center for Youth Law, a nonprofit legal civil rights group, created a free online resource that outlines legal protections and pathways in all 50 states for students who want help with their discrimination issues. The group has also been helping families navigate OCR complaints, and it sued over the Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency last year, a case that’s still working its way through the courts.
“We are going to have to find a way to make it work in the short term because students cannot wait,” said Becky Monroe, senior director for education and civil rights at the National Center for Youth Law and a former Justice Department civil rights lawyer. “Students are genuinely feeling abandoned, so states are stepping up. Civil rights organizations are stepping up.”
States should be stepping up to protect students from discrimination, said Nicole Neily, president of Defending Education, a conservative group that has asked the agency to investigate incidents it believes violate Title IX, the federal education law barring sex discrimination, and Title VI, the federal law that bars discrimination based on race, national origin and shared ancestry. Her group has seen several of its complaints investigated over the past year.
“We're very mindful of, particularly with this move to return education to the states, that the state departments of education are going to have to staff up and the attorneys general office are going to need to bring on more people who are experts in this area,” she said.
But the Office for Civil Rights has long had bandwidth issues, Neily said.
“OCR has been a little slow or depleted, but historically, it's also been slow,” she said, and many states will often refer civil rights cases to the Justice Department.
The Education and Justice departments last week announced the DOJ will take on the brunt of OCR’s work from launching investigations to making final determinations. Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in an interview with Glenn Beck on Wednesday that “99 percent of the work is going to be done” by her division. But even her agency has had staffing woes.
A DOJ spokesperson said the agency has hired 25 new career attorneys in the Civil Rights Division’s education section, including an acting section chief and two career deputy chiefs, and has hired 81 new lawyers in the broader Civil Rights Division.
“Any suggestion that the Civil Rights division cannot handle this endeavor is wildly misguided, and the Division remains committed to protecting the civil rights of ALL Americans,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
Amelia Joy, an Education Department spokesperson, said civil rights enforcement in schools predates the agency’s existence.
“As the Secretary has said countless times, returning education to the states and breaking up the federal education bureaucracy does not mean that critical programs won’t continue,” Joy said in a statement, adding that “ED is partnering with DOJ to improve the efficiency and efficacy of federal civil rights enforcement, and we are confident the partnership will do just that.”
A handful of states are trying to build or expand their ability to investigate civil rights complaints in schools.
“Regardless of the timeframe for moving OCR over, it does make sense for the states to prepare and staff up,” Neily said about the DOJ's takeover of that work. “It would behoove states of all political orientations to get more into the game of oversight.”
Shanderia Minor, a Mississippi Department of Education spokesperson, said the agency "does not have the authority to investigate alleged violations of civil rights because the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights maintains jurisdiction to investigate those allegations."
Arizona's agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights sought to plug its gap in authority to investigate discrimination in schools earlier this year. Executive Director Cleveland Horton led a bill to broaden the commission’s authority that stalled this session.
“Without this bill we don't have much,” Horton said, noting that the only education-related discrimination the commission can enforce centers on employment and accessibility issues.
“If the students are being discriminated against, we don't have the authority as the state's civil rights enforcement agency to investigate those matters,” he said. “Who is better to investigate those matters than the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights and have that authority to ensure that our students are protected?”
Horton said the commission introduced the bill because of the ”significant dilution in the federal administration's enforcement priorities and enforcement efforts” and will continue to push for the measure in the next statehouse session in 2027.
Similarly, Williams, the Pennsylvania lawmaker, said proposing a new agency was directly spurred by the president’s gutting of the federal civil rights office and the shuttering of the Philadelphia regional branch.
“As soon as that happened, you knew that there would be no enforcement for groups of very vulnerable students,” Williams said. “It was like, if this is what is happening at the federal level, what can we do in a state level to fill that void?”
In red states, the Southern Poverty Law Center has helped families and students navigate other venues for their discrimination complaints — especially students with disabilities. But staffing and funding restraints limit the caseload the organization can take on. SPLC’s education team has 14 lawyers and takes on cases in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana.
“It's a tall order for us — or any other groups — to make up what the Department of Education was able to do previously,” Sam Boyd, senior supervising attorney, said in an interview conducted before the organization was indicted on fraud charges in what the organization has described described as a politically motivated prosecution.
“There's not going to be a substitute for the work that OCR did until we have a fully funded office of civil rights and one that is interested in actually enforcing students' civil rights,” he added.
While there is a general divide in resources allocated to civil rights enforcement in red states and blue states, the investment still must be increased in Democratic-led states as well, said Johnathan Smith, Youth Law’s managing education director and a former Justice Department official who also worked at the civil rights agency in New York.
“Those agencies still need more support,” Smith said. “They need, in some cases, greater jurisdiction, and they definitely need additional staff.
“The message should not be that all is well in [blue] states,” he said. “There's still a lot more that needs to be done. And the challenge is that historically, these agencies have largely been overlooked.”
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