The Education Department resolved roughly 30 percent fewer complaints of discrimination in American schools last year than in 2024, the sharpest year-to-year decline in more than three decades amid a Trump administration overhaul of civil rights enforcement, 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 continued pursuit of severe cuts to the department’s civil rights staff has hampered its ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
The decline in resolutions comes as President 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.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon was pressed about the slowdown Tuesday during a Senate budget hearing in which the former pro-wrestling executive was at turns combative and conciliatory about her department’s performance.
“There was a time when we were not processing cases as quickly as we should — we are focused on that moving forward,” Ms. McMahon said during the hearing. Later, a spokeswoman for the department said Ms. McMahon was referring to the 43-day government shutdown last year.
In one exchange, Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said the decline in resolved civil rights cases was a clear result of Ms. McMahon’s dismantling the Education Department. She shuttered seven of 12 regional civil rights offices and fired civil rights lawyers in the department.
“You fired half the department,” Mr. Murphy said.
“That is hindsight,” Ms. McMahon responded.
She told Mr. Murphy that the administration’s budget request for next year sought “more money to hire more lawyers.” But the White House’s budget proposal, submitted to Congress earlier this month, would cut civil rights staff by 49 percent, from 530 workers to 271, part of an overall 35 percent cut to civil rights office funding.
But Ms. McMahon repeatedly refused to acknowledge the cuts in an extended back-and-forth that at several points left Mr. Murphy — one of his party’s most practiced debaters — stammering.
“Let’s just agree to the facts, right?” Mr. Murphy asked Ms. McMahon. “You agree that this budget reduces — you’re proposing to reduce funding for the department by 35 percent.”
“No, I’m not agreeing to that,” Ms. McMahon said.
Later in the hearing, Ms. McMahon retreated, at least slightly, saying the budget proposal should be viewed as the absolute minimum her department needed. “This is the floor that we are recommending for the hiring of the attorneys — as a floor number,” Ms. McMahon said. “Hopefully, we’ll have the ability to increase that.”
Ms. McMahon said she expected to improve results under Kimberly M. Richey, who joined the department in October as assistant secretary for civil rights. Ms. Richey recently reorganized the office to increase efficiency, creating investigative teams dedicated to disability- and race-based complaints, instead of relying solely on a regional approach, Ms McMahon said.
On Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, published a report that 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.
Mr. 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.
“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 the drop in production was resulted from the department’s attempt to fire half of its Office for Civil Rights staff.
After lawsuits challenged the layoffs and the administration was ordered to keep paying civil rights staff, the department opted to also continue barring them from work. As a result, about a quarter of the $140 million budget for the civil rights office was paid to investigators who did not work, 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 government’s most coercive tools to remedy violations of civil rights based on age, color, disability, national origin, race and sex.
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.
Senator Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, urged Ms. McMahon on Tuesday to provide data showing civil rights complaints were being resolved, instead of “just telling the committee that it’s going to happen someday.”
“Just for the record, we expect to see progress,” Ms. Murray said.
“So do I,” Ms. McMahon responded.
