The White House on Wednesday said it had “” $175 million in federal funding from the University of Pennsylvania after a transgender swimmer, Lia Thomas, in 2022 won several medals in Division I women’s swimming.

Also on Wednesday, the U.S. Education Department said its Office of Civil Rights had that the state of Maine violated federal Title IX anti-discrimination law after Katie Spencer, a young transgender pole vaulter, won a state championship last month. The department said Maine could jeopardize federal funding if it doesn’t “swiftly and completely” reverse its policies.��

Protests followed after Thomas and Spencer��began competing in women’s competitions and fared better than they previously had in men’s��events.

The moves follow through on a promise Trump made 16 days after his second inauguration, when he issued an threatening to rescind federal funding from schools that let transgender women play on women’s sports teams

As with other aspects of Trump’s presidency, it leaves institutions in the unenviable position of caving before an increasingly aggressive White House — or fighting back in federal court, where many of the legal issues remain unsettled and, in a few cases, have actually favored trans students.

The order’s practical effect: confusion, especially in the roughly half of states that allow transgender athletes to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. These state laws and policies now face a powerful conservative backlash that sees trans athletes’ participation at every level as patently unfair and itself, and seeks to remove them — and their accomplishments — altogether.

Leading the charge: the education department’s Office of Civil Rights, which has opened more than half a dozen investigations in two months. Along with probes of anti-semitism, trans athletic policies now dominate OCR’s investigative portfolio, despite to the office by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

Jackie Gharapour Wernz, a former OCR attorney who now consults for educational institutions, called the new administration’s approach “unprecedented — but it’s not even just unprecedented. It’s so much further beyond precedent that it just feels like we’re in a completely different world at this point.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said.

‘Fairness and safety’

Penn, Trump’s alma mater, late Wednesday said it had not received any notification or details of the action. But a spokesperson told the that the university “has always followed NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams.”

A spokesperson for the Maine Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

As with Maine, several states are finding that adhering to their own laws can invite a federal investigation — and an abrupt cut in aid — from an administration that is comfortable calling out educators who they see as failing to protect young women in sports. 

The complexity in many ways mirrors public perception. Recent , for instance, find that while 56% of Americans support policies that protect trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing and public spaces, 66% favor laws and policies that require trans athletes to compete on teams that match their sex assigned at birth. 

“As a parent, I’m concerned about fairness and safety for my girls in sports,” said Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and a mother of four. Allowing “biological males” to compete in women’s events, she said, “undermines the level playing field” that federal regulations were meant to protect, “given the inherent physical advantages men have.”

In 2025, the issue no longer falls entirely along ideological lines. Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom has said transgender athletes playing in women’s sports is “” to female athletes. 

States evenly divided

Title IX prohibits sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal funding, but whether that applies to trans students and athletics remains an open question. President Biden in 2022 put forth a sweeping set of changes protecting students against discrimination based not just on sex but on sexual orientation and gender identity, in effect making transgender students a protected class. But the proposal sidestepped the question of athletics, with administration officials at the time saying those regulations would come soon. 

They never came, and the Title IX protections for LGBTQ students have been repeatedly struck down by the courts. Biden put forth a draft rule to protect transgender athletes that acknowledged fairness issues but suggested they could be solved on a case-by-case basis. He last December in advance of Trump’s second term.��

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives approved a transgender ban on women’s and girls’ sports, but the Senate a bid to consider it earlier this month, leaving educators in many states to figure it out on their own.

Add to that in federal courts that have upheld the rights of trans athletes, said Wernz, and schools are in “an incredibly tough position,” especially considering Trump’s order. 

State laws are on the subject: 23 states and the District of Columbia allow transgender students to play on sports teams consistent with their gender identity.

Five days after Trump’s executive order, , which oversees sports in public and private schools, that it was banning trans athletes from participating in girls’ sports, saying schools needed “clear and consistent direction” on the issue. For more than a decade, the group had allowed trans athletes to play via a waiver if they undertook sex reassignment before puberty or if they did hormone therapy, among other requirements.

The league, which oversees 318 schools and about 177,000 students, said just five students applied for waivers last year.

In addition to Maine and Penn, OCR is investigating state athletic associations in California and Minnesota, where officials have said they’ll continue allowing trans athletes to compete on teams that match their gender identity. On March 3, it announced an into a school district in Washington State that allowed a trans player to compete in basketball last month.

It’s also San Jose State University and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association for what it says are violations of Title IX.

Wernz, the former OCR attorney, who worked in both the Obama and Trump administrations, said schools and districts must now decide, “‘Do we comply with the federal courts, or do we comply with the Department of Education?’ Frankly it’s a pretty new situation.” 

‘We’ll see you in court.’

To many, the case of Thomas, the Penn swimmer, has come to epitomize the current complications. In 2022, Thomas, who’d on the men’s team before transitioning in 2019, rose from 554th-ranked in the 200-yard freestyle to fifth. In the 500-yard freestyle, she rose from 65th as a male athlete to first in women’s competition.

While Penn and several teammates supported her during the process, three former Penn swimmers to remove Thomas’ achievements from the record books.

Pennsylvania’s interscholastic athletics governing body recently its policy to recognize Trump’s executive order, but the Philadelphia School District said it’ll ignore the change in favor of its own policy, adopted in 2016, which allows trans athletes to play in sports that match their gender identity. 

While a few experts say that could jeopardize an estimated $216 million in Title I funding, Philadelphia civil rights attorney noted that Trump’s executive order doesn’t carry the weight of law — or supersede Title IX, state law or multiple court decisions that have sided with trans students.

She said Trump “has been purposely sowing a lot of chaos and confusion,” with schools fearful of losing federal funds.

The push to ban trans athletes comes despite the fact that vanishingly small numbers of these students are pushing to play. Shortly after Trump issued the executive order, NCAA President Charlie Baker said the organization would to restrict female athletic competitions solely to student athletes “assigned female at birth.” Several sports associations followed suit, even though Baker last year told Congress that of the more than 500,000 students it represents, fewer than 10 are transgender.

Chris Young, the principal of , a 720-student regional school in Newport, Vt., near the Canadian border, rarely thinks about the topic. He knows that if trans female athletes in Vermont want to play girl’s sports teams, they can. Though he has no trans athletes on his roster, Vermont says treating students differently is illegal. 

In an interview, he recalled several conversations with students asking whether it’s fair that a young person who’s transitioning from male to female could gain a competitive advantage in sports. 

“My response is, ‘No one does this as a choice. It’s who they are, and it’s an incredibly difficult road to go down if you are a transgender athlete,’” he said. “‘No one chooses that because it’s easy, and no one chooses that because they want to win a state championship or set a record. That’s just not how it works.’”

But when trans athletes like Thomas win at nearly any competition, the backlash is often outsized. In Maine, Spencer, the transgender pole vaulter, in mid-February won the Class B state championship in pole vaulting with a jump of 10 feet, 6 inches — more than six inches higher than the next competitor. That led state Rep. Laurel Libby, a Republican, to post on X that in a previous season, as a male athlete, Spencer had in the event.

The issue a few days later, when President Trump got into a televised spat with Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, during a meeting of governors at the White House. With Mills’ colleagues looking on, Trump called her out, asking if she’d comply with his executive order.

Mills said she’s “complying with state and federal laws.” Maine bars discrimination based on gender identity.

Trump responded, “We are the federal law,” and threatened to pull Maine’s federal funding. 

“We’ll see you in court,” she replied.

Later that day, the education department . Days later, the administration released a that all but foretold the outcome, saying it’s “shameful” that Mills “refuses to stand with women and girls.” 

For her part, Mills says no president can withhold funding authorized by Congress “in an attempt to coerce someone into compliance with his will.” 

In a , she added, “Maine may be one of the first states to undergo an investigation by his Administration, but we won’t be the last.”

The school choice advocate and Republican mega-donor has kept a relatively low profile since leaving Washington last January, mostly attending to policy developments in her home state of Michigan. Her call to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education, unveiled at , represented a return to the national spotlight — not just for DeVos, but for an idea that has hung around Republican politics for decades. 

Even more remarkably, DeVos’s sentiments were echoed a few weeks later by her former boss. Denouncing what he described as the politicized teaching of subjects like race and sexuality before a joyful crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, that if the federal government promoted “radicalism” in academic instruction, “we should abolish the Department of Education.”

Conservatives have sought to scrap the department, and dramatically reduce Washington’s K-12 footprint, since it was created in 1979. Those efforts, including that would take effect by the end of this year, have generally been seen as quixotic; even when they held unified control over Congress and the White House, Trump and DeVos floated, but never came close to pursuing, the Departments of Education and Labor.

The political fallout of that kind of reshuffle would be hard to predict, but potentially severe. According to , over half of Americans view the Department of Education favorably. The department collects and disseminates scientific evidence on schooling through the Institute of Education Sciences, plays a public watchdog role through its Office of Civil Rights, and helps equalize school funding with the tens of billions of dollars provided by Title I. All of these purposes are served with of any cabinet department. 

But while policy experts consider outright abolition a farfetched notion, they say it reflects a long-running contest between dueling urges in American education: a strong distrust of federal influence on one hand, and on the other, profound dissatisfaction with the status quo. During the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the second impulse was dominant, with massive new federal initiatives launched around school performance and accountability. But resistance to federal authority has been growing for a decade, and the renewed energy around abolition is breaking through just as the disgust of Republican voters — with perceived indoctrination in classrooms, federal recommendations on COVID safety, and much else — has crested. 

Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute who studies public administration, said that the government’s response to COVID had engendered “a clear backlash” among Republicans. Even as pandemic health measures were largely decided at the state level, he added, Washington’s guidelines on masking and vaccines in schools have fueled the party’s enmity toward federal interventions in education.

“The Right certainly doesn’t trust the federal government to lead some sort of learning recovery response,” Kosar said. “They would much rather pull the power back to local communities and have the feds stay as far away as possible.”

Jack Jennings, a retired policy maven who served as the Democrats’ top education aide in the House of Representatives, argued that shrinking the public sector is never as easy as it sounds. But he added that abolition is electorally potent with the Republican base before the 2022 midterm elections, likening it to a “red flag in front of a bull.” 

“It’s not an issue that’s going to come to fruition soon, but it’s one of those things that rattles the cages of conservatives,” Jennings said.

Unions divided

The department has always had its share of detractors. At its inception, that group even included many Democrats.

By the late 1970s, the federal government’s responsibilities over education — codified in landmark laws like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 — were housed in the then-Department of Healthcare, Education, and Welfare. President Jimmy Carter’s insistence on carving out an entity devoted specifically to K-12 was borne of , the nation’s largest teachers’ union, which had helped Carter secure the Democratic nomination in 1976. Until that election, the NEA had never issued a presidential endorsement.

But according to Jennings, many in the president’s own party were leery of the idea. Even fervent liberals worried that a dedicated agency would induce untold “meddling” in the affairs of schools and districts. Albert Shanker, the influential president of the American Federation of Teachers, lobbied against the change out of concern that his own union would be put at a disadvantage.

“[Carter] was fulfilling a campaign promise by sending it to the Congress,” Jennings recalled. “But when the Congress received it, Democrats were not all in favor of it.”

In the end, necessary authorizing legislation passed in the perennially Democratic House . But Democratic resistance faded over time, as the government’s sizable outlays to educate poor and disabled students gelled easily with the party’s own priorities. Hostility among Republicans would be a feature of the policy landscape for years to come.

Ronald Reagan the newly created department while still a presidential candidate. That pledge years later, following the national alarm stoked by the release of the administration’s bombshell report, A Nation at Risk; after declaring a national education emergency in its first term, it would have appeared perverse for the administration to gut the nation’s foremost education authority in its second.

Still, Reagan later appointed as education secretary the public intellectual William Bennett, whose views were . And the Republican position remained clear for years afterward. Lamar Alexander, a former Tennessee governor who led the department under President George H.W. Bush and later served three terms in the U.S. Senate, his abortive 1996 presidential campaign. for eventual nominee Bob Dole included a promise to eliminate the Department of Education (along with the Departments of Energy, Commerce, and Housing and Urban Development).

David Cleary, a former senior aide to Alexander who now serves as the Republican staff director for the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, said his party’s enduring skepticism toward federal overreach explained its drive to abolish. Moreover, few of the department’s functions need to be administered nationally.

“The U.S. Department of Education doesn’t establish a curriculum — thank God — doesn’t establish education standards, doesn’t establish tests, and doesn’t establish criteria for institutions of higher education,” Cleary said. “So it really is just a grant-making entity with a huge bureaucracy.”

A short-lived honeymoon

Notwithstanding the Right’s philosophical objections, however, the last quarter-century has been a time of bipartisan acceptance for the department. The key figure in that detente was George W. Bush.

It was the Texas governor’s wholesale embrace of education reform — part of a “compassionate conservative” push that helped Republicans recover from Dole’s landslide 1996 defeat — that set the stage for the No Child Left Behind Act. That law, the biggest expansion of the federal government’s educational powers since the Civil Rights era, was enacted through a generational compromise with Democrats: The Left would get more resources to improve chronically failing schools (which they later complained was short-changed), while the Right would get tighter accountability for academic results (which later trampled on local autonomy, they grumbled).

Both parties returned early from their political honeymoon, with Democrats and teachers’ unions against a law they helped shepherd into being. But it was Republicans, disenchanted with the department’s broader scope over local schools, that migrated further from the vision of a more muscular federal role.

Their distaste only grew as responsibility for implementing NCLB fell to the Obama administration. As Secretary of Education Arne Duncan backed ambitious policy initiatives like Race to the Top and Common Core, Tea Party conservatives — increasingly in concert with the leadership of both NEA and AFT — demanded a reversal of the department’s growing remit. 

Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, compared the public’s attitude toward education reform to a pendulum that periodically swings toward greater federal involvement.

“But then we suddenly discover that that’s too pushy…and it’s embarrassing people, so there’s a backlash,” Finn remarked. “That’s what was beginning to happen in the late Bush and Obama years, and that’s when they started giving waivers and making exceptions so that the pushing wasn’t as hard or as uniform.”

The retreat from NCLB’s strictures in the mid-2010s was not total. The law that supplanted it, 2015’s Every Student Succeeds Act, left in place some Bush- and Obama-era accountability measures while granting states more freedom to chart their own course. But even the relaxation of regulations couldn’t shield the department from the dissatisfaction that would follow in the pandemic era.

“It still felt like there was a truce, fundamentally — that the federal role in education was legit,” said AEI’s Kosar. “Then we get some of the executive orders in the Obama administration that struck the right as ‘woke.’ And now we get schools being an epicenter for debates about how to respond to the coronavirus. That’s what sparked the most recent revolt against the feds.”

‘Anyone pushing this is going to be savaged’

If the intellectual history of abolition is well-documented, its potential as a governing proposal is hazy.

To put it simply, the Department of Education is a well-known entity with countless supportive constituencies. Eliminating its offices and employees would require relocating the trillion-dollar federal student loan program, which plays an integral role in sending millions of students to college. Title I, which dispenses billions to districts and schools that serve children facing academic and socioeconomic challenges, has its own army of defenders in both Congress and the states. Billions more go to special-education students.

“It’s going to be a heavy lift,” Kosar said. “Every interest group is going to come out and want to keep its programs alive. And of course, anyone pushing to do this is going to be savaged viciously as anti-education.”

Even if a future Republican administration were to keep the most popular initiatives intact, they would face two significant logistical hurdles. First, relocating those programs in other agencies — student loans at the Treasury, for instance, or the Office of Civil Rights at the Justice Department — would almost certainly require a statutory change that Democrats wouldn’t go along with. So full GOP control of government, plus filibuster-proof majorities, would be a necessity.

If this could be achieved, the federal role, however shrunken, would be scattered in pieces across the executive branch. Without the unified leadership provided by a secretary, their effectiveness could be severely hampered.

Jennings, the former longtime House staffer, said the end result would be a succession of functions “spun off into different areas of the federal government. And there would be no coordination among them because they would be answerable to different people.”

Cleary, the Senate HELP Committee aide, conceded that the political obstacles would be significant. But a more limited administrative campaign against the department, entailing the systematic elimination of Democratic regulations and mass block-granting of its various programs, could be achieved under a future Republican administration, he said.

“If I were the secretary of education, or advising one, I would do a hiring freeze and just not hire new people, and start to burn out the Deep State, if you will,” he said. “You don’t really need as many people as they have.”

Finn, a former department hand who openly desires a “serious rethinking” of the federal role in education, said that neither wholesale elimination nor reform was likely on any near-term timeframe. Entering an era of greater partisan divides on the Department of Education, he added, Republicans would be forced to offer greater specificity around their signature education promise.   

“The question’s always the same: Do [conservatives] just want to abolish the building with the name over it that says ‘Department of Education?’ Or do they want to abolish the federal functions that it contains? Because those are such different things.”