Sarah Cook spent months trying to cajole her Ohio school district into providing a safe way for her medically fragile daughter to attend school in person during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After a series of increasingly tense, circular conversations, Cook called in the closest thing she had to a cavalry: The office for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education, which is charged with enforcing federal civil rights laws in the nation’s schools.
With OCR’s involvement, “I felt like I had a partner in trying to help me get resolution,” Cook said. “They had some authority, whereas I felt a bit powerless to get the district to listen.”
It’s an open question how the Trump administration’s plan to shift OCR to the U.S. Department of Justice will affect school districts and families like Cook’s seeking fair, timely resolutions to violations of students’ civil rights.
OCR has already changed dramatically during the second Trump administration, with its staff shrinking; most of its regional offices closing; and its priorities shifting to enforcement of administration policies such as eradicating state and school district programs seen as advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion and rules allowing transgender students to participate in girls’ athletics.
Now, the Trump administration argues the transfer of OCR responsibilities to the Justice Department’s civil rights division will “strengthen the federal government’s enforcement of federal civil rights laws in our nation’s schools” and won’t “impact students, parents or families who believe they have experienced discrimination,” a fact sheet from both agencies says.
Former employees of both agencies, however, point to big structural differences between the two offices. OCR must consider every complaint it receives and generally seeks an administrative—rather than a legal—resolution whereas the Justice Department more commonly pursues litigation, and does so selectively. Plus, OCR typically employs about 15 times as many attorneys as the educational opportunities office in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, though neither agency is fully staffed right now, former employees from both say.
What’s more, the shift may give the Trump administration more potent legal tools to investigate and litigate against schools and districts that run afoul of its policies on DEI and transgender students.
Earlier this summer, shortly after the transfer was announced, Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, told conservative radio host Glenn Beck that her office would pursue legal action to prevent students from having “illegal gender ideology … forced down their throats” without parental permission.
A power shift away from parents, or a more powerful civil rights tool?
Under the new arrangement, the Trump administration says OCR will refer complaints it receives to the Justice Department’s civil rights division for “evaluation, investigation, and attempted resolution.” OCR attorneys are to notify those filing complaints that they’ve referred their cases.
The agreement between the two agencies says OCR will reimburse the Justice Department for these services, but doesn’t specify whether it will transfer staff to handle these duties.
OCR receives receives thousands of complaints per year alleging discrimination based on disability, race, sex, and age—22,687 in federal fiscal year 2024, the most recent year for which the office prepared a report on its activities for Congress.
Historically, OCR has employed about 600 attorneys, though there have been significant cutbacks in Trump’s second term. Trump’s most recent budget request, for federal fiscal year 2027, pegged the number of OCR employees at 271, down from 530 in fiscal year 2025. (The request also seeks a 35% budget reduction for OCR.)
The DOJ’s educational opportunities section, a part of its civil rights division that has traditionally worked with OCR on big, systemic investigations, has no similar mandate to probe every complaint it receives. In fact, it refers the vast majority to OCR, former employees said.
And DOJ’s office has a much leaner staff, typically around 40 attorneys, though recently the office had as few as half a dozen staffers, former employees said. (DOJ declined to confirm staffing figures.)
While OCR can withhold federal funds from a district that violates civil rights laws, the agency traditionally has been far more apt to work with districts and parents to come up with a plan to remedy the situation. In 2024, the office resolved 638 cases through what it called a “rapid resolution process.”
DOJ, on the other hand, typically sues districts to get them to follow the law—a slow and resource-intensive process, according to career staffers who have worked at both OCR and DOJ’s education office.
By design, parents, caregivers, and advocacy organizations don’t need an attorney—or deep knowledge of education or civil rights laws—to submit a complaint and get a response from OCR.
The change represents “a huge power shift away from families and parents and school communities,” said Michael Pillera, who served as a career attorney in OCR under three presidents, including during President Donald Trump’s first term. “A person can file a complaint on their phone in five minutes. An OCR attorney can call the school district, and something can be resolved quickly, and for the benefit of everyone.”
DOJ’s specialty, litigation, “has an important role in ensuring civil rights, but litigation doesn’t do all of those things as efficiently, as meaningfully,” added Pillera, who is now the director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “Litigation can take years. It’s expensive. It’s time-consuming. It requires lawyers.”
But DOJ might be more effective at getting results for students, particularly in cases of systemic discrimination, argued Ken Marcus, who served as the assistant secretary in charge of OCR during part of the first Trump administration.
“The Department of Justice has a bigger hammer and is more feared,” said Marcus, the founder, chairman, and CEO of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, which focuses on combatting antisemitism. “It certainly can give students and their families the sense that they have brought in the big guns.”
Not all details about the OCR-DOJ arrangements have been announced
Big questions loom about how all this will work under the new arrangement.
Will OCR, through the Justice Department’s civil rights division, still consider every complaint it receives? Will complaints still be resolved primarily administratively, rather than through lawsuits? How many attorneys will be charged with handling OCR complaints, and will some OCR staffers transfer to the Justice Department? Will OCR’s budget approved by Congress—$140 million in fiscal year 2026—transfer to DOJ?
A spokesperson for DOJ declined to answer those questions. An Education Department spokesperson didn’t answer them, either, but referred a reporter to a two-page fact sheet on the OCR transfer.
In a statement, Education Department spokesperson Amelia Joy blamed the Biden administration for “pandering to an extreme ideology, illegally rewriting the law, and letting the safety and wellbeing of students fall to the wayside.” The Trump administration, she said, is “focused on restoring OCR to its original purpose—enforcing the law to ensure all students can receive an education free from discrimination.”
OCR often focuses on cases affecting just a few students
To be sure, OCR does investigate widespread, systemic discrimination.
For instance, a 2010 probe found instruction for English learners in Los Angeles Unified was inadequate and needed a dramatic overhaul—a finding that affected more than 150,000 students in the nation’s second-largest school district.
But the agency also looks at instances of alleged discrimination that may affect only one student, such as Cook’s daughter’s case.
Investigating each complaint often requires extensive interviews and fieldwork, Pillera and other former OCR employees said.
An OCR official, for example, might visit an elementary school to see if its playground really is inaccessible to students with physical disabilities.
In Cook’s daughter’s case, OCR interviewed not only Cook, but her child’s doctors and district officials.
If a school district or state education agency is found in violation of civil rights laws and refuses to make changes, OCR could withhold a portion of its funding.
But that rarely happens, experts say.
Instead, it is much more common for districts to agree to changes that will bring them into compliance. LAUSD, for instance, committed to significant changes to instruction for English learners.
After OCR concluded that Cook’s daughter had been denied a free and appropriate education, the district agreed to provide one-on-one math tutoring and allowed her to attend a summer enrichment program at no cost.
These moves were intended to help make up for the loss of academic instruction and socialization during the months when the girl received just three hours of home instruction per week, Cook said.
“These things are not ‘moving mountains’ type of resolutions, and yet they have enormous impacts on the folks who are facing discrimination,” Pillera said.
Justice Dept. focuses on larger cases
DOJ, on the other hand, tends to pick cases that will have the greatest impact for the greatest number of students, former staffers said.
“We were not really in the business of doing individual investigations,” said Amy Berman, who worked in the Justice Department’s educational opportunities section under both Republicans and Democratic administrations, including as its principal deputy.
Marcus acknowledged the differences in the agencies’ approaches. But, in his mind, that’s a potential strength of the new arrangement—particularly in cases of widespread discrimination.
“The weakness of the OCR process has been that it virtually never reached its ultimate conclusion with funds termination,” Marcus said. “As a result, OCR was not feared as much as some student advocates would have liked. That gave it less power to exact changes when systemic changes were required.”
Staffing presents a practical hurdle to the Justice Department’s education office examining every complaint, added Berman, who is now the deputy director of the National Academy of Education, a research organization.
“Even if you gave them 100 new people, how could they possibly process that volume without the sort of institutional knowledge and the case-managing structures” OCR built up over the decades? said Berman, who is also a former OCR staffer.
Marcus agreed that proper staffing is a consideration. The Education Department attempted to lay off about half of OCR’s staff, and most career attorneys have left the Justice Department’s civil rights division. He expects both agencies to launch hiring initiatives.
“There’s no question that the Department of Justice will need to hire up quickly and substantially if it is going to handle all of the cases that the Education Department’s office for civil rights had been handling,” said Marcus. “The fact is that even OCR will need to hire quickly to handle its residual responsibilities. Both of them will need to bulk up.”
The Justice Dept. has already started investigating some schools
In a sign of the Trump administration’s approach to school civil rights investigations, the Justice Department is already investigating how 43 districts in three states teach about sexuality and gender identity and whether they give parents the opportunity to opt their children out of lessons that conflict with their religious beliefs.
In her interview with Beck, Dhillon also lambasted laws in states like California that she contends give preference in competitions for public contracts to historically disadvantaged groups, such as racial minorities.
That’s a sign her agency may use its authority to pursue legal cases against districts it believes allow for racial preferences that the Trump administration contends are illegal.
Under the second Trump administration, OCR has already begun dozens of such investigations, mostly focused on colleges and universities. At the K-12 level, the office is looking into a prominent northern Virginia magnet school that examines applicants holistically in part to achieve a racially diverse student body, for instance.
School districts that find themselves in DOJ’s crosshairs are likely to have a much bigger problem on their hands than they might if OCR were running the investigation, said Jackie Gharapour Wernz, a civil rights lawyer who has advised school districts on legal issues and worked in OCR from 2016 to 2018 under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
“They are rough when they come after you,” she said of DOJ, adding that school districts have historically been more apt to have to deal with OCR.
OCR has already been weakened by significant staff departures and the closing of seven of its 12 regional offices, in Atlanta, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. OCR reassigned their caseloads to the five remaining offices.
School district officials and families seem increasingly to view the office as lacking the teeth it once had, Wernz said.
“OCR has historically been a very real threat for schools, and now I think the message people are probably getting is this doesn’t matter anymore,” she said. “That terrifies me as someone whose job is to try to help people not get in trouble.”
Wernz has noted anecdotally that parents—often with the help of advocacy groups—are more likely to sue school districts rather than appeal to a hobbled OCR if they suspect discrimination. That’s a more costly prospect for both families and school districts.
OCR looked for patterns and helped school districts follow the law
OCR’s historical structure allowed the agency—particularly regional offices that became familiar with school districts in their territory—to look for patterns in complaints filed about particular districts.
A sudden spike in similar-sounding allegations about a district’s handling of accommodations for students with disabilities, for example, could trigger a broader probe.
The office also offers technical assistance—essentially free explanations of the laws it enforces—to parents, school districts, and education advocates. OCR staff in 2024 responded to 11,000 inquires and conducted 211 technical assistance presentations, the agency’s report said.
Under the OCR arrangement with the Justice Department, OCR retains its technical assistance responsibilities. But the office has effectively lost its capacity to provide it, said Pillera, the former OCR staffer now working with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
Requests for information “came from parents, they came from teachers, they came from school leaders,” Pillera said. Educators “have to be concerned that they no longer have that person to call up and ask those questions to. That’s gone.”
Could OCR return to its former status?
It’s unclear if the shift of OCR to DOJ will be permanent.
Republicans on the House education committee recently approved a spate of bills that would codify much of the Trump administration’s dissolution of the Education Department, including the shift of most K-12 programs to the Labor Department.
But none dealt with sending OCR to DOJ, a shift Democrats have vehemently opposed. Similarly, legislation pending in the Senate to block the transfer of education programs to different agencies doesn’t address the OCR move.
Unless Congress codifies the shift, which seems politically unlikely given that it would require 60 votes in a closely divided Senate, OCR could well return to the Education Department in a subsequent presidential administration.
But even if the office goes back, it could take many years for the office to recover from the loss of staff expertise and community trust, former OCR employees argue.
“It’s a lot easier to destroy things than it is to build them,” Pillera said.
