Maine must take steps to prohibit transgender athletes from playing on girls’ sports teams in the next 10 days or it will risk losing millions of dollars in federal education funds, according to a letter the U.S. Department of Education sent to state education leaders on Wednesday.
The Education Department’s office for civil rights said on Wednesday that, after a roughly monthlong investigation, it had found Maine’s education department in violation of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at schools, by allowing transgender girls to play on girls’ sports teams and use girls’ locker rooms. The civil rights office said school districts across the state are similarly violating the federal law by following state policy.
The finding and notification escalate Republican President Donald Trump’s use of federal school funding as a cudgel to exact compliance with his executive orders.
The Maine example—in which the state’s Democratic governor has publicly been at odds with Trump—has become a test case for whether, and how, the administration will make good on its threats to pull K-12 funding from states and schools that disobey the president’s orders.
The Education Department is now the second federal agency to find Maine in violation of Title IX, after the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued its own violations findings late last month and earlier this week. That agency also gave state leaders 10 days to change athletics policies.
The finding from the Education Department’s office for civil rights is “much more powerful” because of how much money it oversees that flows to the state’s education department and schools, said Jackie Wernz, a civil rights attorney who previously served in the civil rights office.
“They really control access to all educational funds for an institution. Because of that, there is a more drawn-out process before the Department of Education can cut off the spigot,” Wernz said.
The department couldn’t take away all of Maine’s funding within 10 days if it follows its processes, she said. “There will be additional steps where someone is going to have to agree with the Trump administration’s interpretation of Title IX before these funds are going to be cut off.”
Republican and Democratic administrations have gone back and forth over whether Title IX affirmatively protects transgender students from discrimination. But legal experts have said that there’s nothing in the statute requiring that schools exclude transgender girls from girls’ sports.
The Education Department sent a proposed resolution agreement to Maine’s education department to resolve the violation finding, asking education officials there to direct public schools to forbid transgender athletes from joining girls’ sports teams and using locker rooms designated for women. Under the proposed agreement, the state must rescind guidance that allows transgender athletes to play on girls’ and women’s teams and require schools to submit an “annual certification of compliance” to the state’s education department.
The proposed agreement also asks the state to “restore” recognitions that cisgender girls and women “would have earned” if they hadn’t been given to transgender athletes, and send an apology letter to each of those student-athletes “for allowing her educational experience and participation in school sports to be marred by sex discrimination.”
If the state doesn’t agree to the resolution in 10 days, the office for civil rights said it would start the process of referring the case to the U.S. Department of Justice—which has previously threatened to sue Maine over its transgender athlete policy—"for enforcement including termination of MDOE’s funding.”
The Maine Principals’ Association, which oversees high school athletics in the state, has said that only two transgender girls are competing this year, according to local reporting.
The Maine education department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Previously, Gov. Janet Mills called the outcome of the OCR investigation “all but predetermined.”
“My Administration will begin work with the Attorney General to defend the interests of Maine people in the court of law,” Mills said in a statement last month. “But do not be misled: this is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.”
A state’s defiance of Trump’s executive order becomes a test case
Maine became a national example last month, when Trump singled out the state during a White House luncheon for governors, saying it had better comply with the president’s Feb. 5 executive order that threatened to pull funding from any school or university that allowed transgender athletes to play on girls’ sports teams.
Mills, who was at the luncheon, told the president her state was following state and federal law. “See you in court,” she said.
Swiftly, three federal agencies opened investigations into the state, with the Health and Human Services Department turning around its first finding of a Title IX violation within days. Officials said no one had been contacted during their initial investigation, which the federal agency later amended to include the principals’ association and a high school.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which launched an investigation into the University of Maine System, said Wednesday that the university system—which has no transgender athletes—was in compliance with Trump’s executive order.
“The choice for the rest of Maine is simple: protect equal opportunities for women, as required by law, or lose funding,” the department said in a news release.
Legal experts have said there’s nothing in the text of Title IX to support Trump’s position that it requires the exclusion of transgender girls from girls’ athletics. Though it hasn’t been resolved in the courts, no court has ever found that Title IX requires the exclusion, experts said.
The case in Maine could tee up a court battle.
The case has also called into question how the Education Department’s office for civil rights—which is losing more than 40 percent of its staff in departmentwide layoffs announced last week—is operating. Typically, its investigations take months or years to complete.
The office also truncated what is typically a 90-day period for negotiating an agreement, Wernz said.
Typically, if the office and alleged violator can’t reach an agreement in that window, the office declares an impasse, triggering the process for pulling funds. In the department’s letter to Maine, it suggests that the parties will be at an impasse if the state doesn’t greenlight the proposed resolution agreement in 10 days, Wernz said.
It’s also “unprecedented” for OCR to find that a number of different districts—outside of those it’s investigating—are also in violation, Wernz said.
“They basically are saying, ‘We essentially believe that we have enough to show that all of these school districts ... are also violating the law,’” she said, noting that OCR hasn’t even notified other districts that they’re under investigation.
It’s rare for the federal government to take federal funds from schools and universities it finds in violation. The last time the Education Department withheld funds from a school district over a violation of a civil rights law was in 1990.
But the Trump administration is more readily freezing federal funds, particularly for universities.
On Wednesday, the administration paused $175 million in funds from the Health and Human Services and Defense departments for the University of Pennsylvania for allowing a transgender athlete to compete in women’s sports.
Earlier this month, Trump’s administration axed $400 million in grants to Columbia University over its handling of antisemitism complaints, as investigations continued there.
The Trump administration briefly froze USDA funding to the University of Maine System as it investigated the institution over transgender athletes.
