NEWS: New GAO Report Finds Trump Admin Wasted up to $38 Million While Weakening Civil Rights for Students

WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 - According to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, the Trump administration's efforts to illegally dismantle the Education Department wasted up to $38 million by paying investigators at its Office for Civil Rights (OCR) not to work while it dismissed roughly 90% of discrimination complaints from students nationwide without review.

Commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), and released today by the GAO, the report examines the costs to American students and taxpayers of Trump's attempts to illegally fire nearly 500 dedicated workers at OCR, the agency responsible for protecting students from discrimination based on race, sex, disability, color, national origin and age. The president's layoffs came a year after OCR received a record number of civil rights complaints in 2024.

"Every child in America should be able to get a good education no matter where they live, what their religious beliefs are or whether or not they have a disability," Sanders said. "Instead, the Trump administration fired half of the Education Department employees working to protect the civil rights of students and wasted as much as $38 million in taxpayer dollars by preventing investigators from doing their jobs. That is unacceptable."

The report documents the unprecedented efforts by the Trump administration to gut the agency responsible for enforcing federal nondiscrimination laws in schools and colleges:

• In March 2025, after the administration attempted to lay off nearly half of OCR's workforce, those employees were kept on paid administrative leave for nine months - costing taxpayers up to $38 million while investigators were barred from doing their jobs.
• During Trump's 2025 government shutdown, the administration proposed a second round of layoffs, slashing OCR to just 10% of its prior capacity.
• In December, the administration reversed course and reinstated staff, ending the lawsuits, but some of the damage could not be reversed. Today, far fewer investigators are serving our students than in 2024.
• During this period, Americans filed more than 9,000 discrimination complaints with OCR - and roughly 90% were dismissed without review.

The report builds on Sanders' oversight efforts to hold the Trump administration accountable for weaponizing and undermining civil rights laws. Last month, Sanders released a report revealing that the president has violated or likely violated the First Amendment in 17 cases related to college campuses, according to federal courts. In March 2025, Sanders released a report finding that the administration's reckless layoffs at OCR would leave more than 46 million students in 27 states and territories without dedicated investigators to protect their educational civil rights.

Read the report here.

• Print
• Email
• Share
• Tweet