President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for the closure of the U.S. Department of Education puts enforcement of gender equity in sports in question just as college athletic departments are preparing to pay student-athletes for the first time.
The department’s Office for Civil Rights has historically been responsible for enforcing Title IX, the 1972 federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in schools that receive federal funding. Title IX has largely been credited with the rise of women’s sports over the past half century.
The White House has not spelled out formally which of the education department’s functions could be handed off to other departments or eliminated altogether. Trump said Thursday that his administration will aim to close the department beyond “core necessities,” preserving its responsibility for Title I funding for low-income schools, Pell grants for higher education and money for children with disabilities. However, completing its dismantling is most likely impossible without an act of Congress, which created the department in 1979. Republicans said they will introduce legislation to achieve that, while Democrats have quickly lined up to oppose the idea.
The Office for Civil Rights determines how K-12 schools and colleges and universities are supposed to provide equal opportunities for female athletes, which includes equitable financial aid, promotion, coaching salaries, equipment and travel, among other factors.
The office investigates complaints, and as of mid-January, had 199 pending investigations into sex discrimination in athletics, of which 58 were at colleges or universities, according to its website.
The Office for Civil Rights also sets the rules for and handles complaints about how schools respond to reports of sexual harassment and assault, which often include reports by and against athletes and led to notable investigations, including those at Baylor and Michigan State.
The department is responsible for applying Title IX to the issue of transgender athletes. Trump signed an executive order in February banning transgender women from participating in girls and women’s sports. Shortly after, the department launched multiple investigations into schools it stated had allowed or were continuing to allow transgender women to compete on female teams in K-12 or college athletics.
A week after that order, the education department issued a statement noting that Title IX does not apply to name, image and likeness (NIL) deals, rescinding the Biden administration’s guidance issued in December that schools must equitably distribute direct payments to male and female athletes.
The decision would affect how college athletic departments are required to distribute up to $20.5 million annually in direct payments to athletes as the result of a pending antitrust settlement involving the NCAA and its power conferences. Pending court approval, the payments are scheduled to start this summer.
Many major college athletic departments plan to distribute the majority of that money to athletes in sports that generate the most revenue — namely football and men’s basketball — leaving a small portion, often less than 5%, to women’s sports.
The Biden memo said that future payments should be considered “athletic financial assistance” and therefore must be shared proportionally between men and women athletes. The education department’s statement last month reversed that decision, noting that, “The claim that Title IX forces schools and colleges to distribute student-athlete revenues proportionately based on gender equity considerations is sweeping and would require clear legal authority to support it.”
Valerie Bonnette, a long-time former Office of Civil Rights employee who co-authored the department’s 1990 Title IX Athletics Investigator’s Manual, sent a letter earlier this month to athletic directors at colleges and universities offering a rebuttal to the department’s decision.
“For 50 years, the Office for Civil Rights has viewed any revenues and outside funding that leads to benefits for student-athletes as covered by Title IX,” the letter states. “This approach represents a bedrock principle that is fundamental for all civil rights laws, not just Title IX. To allow outside funding to alleviate an educational institution’s obligation to ensure equity is to condone rampant discrimination paid for by the highest bidder.”
Separate from the plans for distributing future athletic department revenue, Title IX has long been used to guarantee equal opportunities for participation for male and female athletes, scholarship amounts in proportion to the participation of each gender, and equitable equipment, travel and accommodations and publicity, among other factors, including compensation of coaches. A statement from the Women’s Sports Foundation responding to the plan to eliminate the education department noted that even without the current structure, the gender equity laws still need to be enforced.
“Education is the cornerstone of many sports experiences for boys and girls in the United States and Title IX is responsible for the exponential growth we’ve seen for women and girls. Title IX has stood strong for almost 53 years and will continue to be the law,” the statement read.
“Regardless of where oversight for Title IX sits, schools must continue to comply with it and we expect enforcement of the law, including its regulations around athletics.”
The education department required schools to report annually how much money they spent on men’s and women’s sports and to note the participation rate of each, and it shared those data on a public website. It’s unclear what happens to those requirements and ongoing investigations, and the department’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.
The department’s data are vital for measuring how well colleges and universities comply with providing equitable resources to male and female athletes, said Arthur Bryant, an attorney who often represents female athletes in Title IX disputes.
While Title IX as a law remains intact, Bryant said a big question is what happens to all the regulations and policy interpretations the department administers. That could include the methods for measuring gender equity compliance in athletics to determining how to respond to reports of sexual assault.
“Does that mean that some other part of the government … is going to be responsible but without people with the level of expertise?” he said. “I don’t think anybody knows. I don’t think the administration has expressed any plans. It’s all such a hypothetical pie in the sky.”
The Heritage Foundation is among a number of groups to suggest moving the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice. The DOJ is responsible for enforcing the Jeanne Clery Campus Safety Act, which among other things requires schools to provide campus crime reports and victim services and often intersects with the sexual harassment and assault portion of Title IX.
Education department officials also did not answer questions what, if any, duties would fall to existing DOJ staff, who would likely need to be trained on how to carry out the education policies, or if workers from the education department would be moved over.
Staff cuts have already hit the department, which had requested additional staff under the Biden administration to catch up with a ballooning number of complaints and investigations. Newly confirmed Secretary Linda McMahon has made statements in recent interviews indicating that the drawdown in employees was likely to continue. Bryant said that without education department enforcement, even more responsibility for addressing unequal treatment for female athletes and other civil rights issues will fall to the courts.
“The enforcement of the anti-discrimination laws will depend on the willingness of victims of discrimination to fight,” he said. “If the law still exists and the federal government doesn’t have anybody who is going to enforce it, then women and men who are victims of discrimination are going to have to enforce it themselves and the courts are going to have to be way more involved in everything.”
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
