The Trump administration is weighing “corrective action” against those responsible for spearheading former President Joe Biden’s now-defunct “gender identity” policies for schools, according to a government report.
Biden’s Department of Education (ED) moved to include “gender identity” and “sexual orientation” as protected classes under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act in violation of a 2022 court order, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) said in a Wednesday letter to President Donald Trump. ED is now investigating allegations that Biden-era staff “may have attempted to conceal those efforts through coercive or intimidating conduct,” the OSC said in an accompanying report.
ED “intends to take corrective action against current or former employees, where warranted, and provide appropriate relief or other remedies to affected employees,” the OSC report said, referencing a whistleblower who came forward during Biden’s term.
The White House and ED did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
In response to a January 2021 executive order, Biden officials released guidance documents that year that interpreted Title IX’s anti-discrimination protections for women to include gays and people who identify as the opposite gender. ED later began implementing the guidance despite a 2022 federal court injunction barring it from doing so, which an appeals court upheld in 2024, the OSC found.
ED initially sent a report to OSC that denied the whistleblower’s story — but it excluded documentation that later showed otherwise, the OSC said.
“I commend the whistleblower for being persistent in reporting the disclosure despite significant internal resistance,” OSC Chief Counsel Charles Baldis said. “Given the seriousness of the substantiated allegations — spanning several years, multiple offices, and layers of leadership — OSC recommends that the whistleblower be considered for a monetary award in recognition of the importance of the disclosure and the risks undertaken in bringing it to light.”
“We also encourage the Department of Education to thoroughly and efficiently complete their investigation of any wrongdoing in this matter and to provide transparency to the public about its conclusions and actions,” Baldis said.
The Biden-Harris administration used its Title IX interpretation to try to force schools to implement “gender identity” rules with a policy that courts repeatedly struck down. The conservative group Defending Education urged the Trump administration in a Wednesday letter to formally rescind the policy.
“Biden’s Title IX regulation was a legal abomination,” Defending Education vice president Sarah Parshall Perry said in a statement to the DCNF. “In 11 federal litigation challenges to the rule, the Biden Administration lost every single time.”
“It is high time for the regulation to be sent to the dustheap of history,” said Perry, a former ED senior counsel. “Doing so will prevent another lawless administration from taking liberties with the plain text of a law designed to protect women and girls on campuses across the country.”
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