Donald Trump spent years raging against the Biden administration for elevating women and ethnic minorities into positions for which he said they were not qualified.

Now, a president who pledged to crack down on favouritism towards select groups in government is being accused of the same bias — in reverse.

At the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), a sub-agency of the Department of Education, staff say they are baffled by the crop of new political appointees entrusted with leading the agency’s fight against discrimination in public education.

“They’re just white, straight, male DEI hires,” a senior supervisor who recently left the agency told The Times. “The irony of all of this is that the same people in the front office at OCR are now the same political appointees who were screaming their heads off about DEI.”

The agency enforces civil rights laws in schools and universities and investigates disability, sex and race-based discrimination complaints.

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Under Biden the OCR was led by a woman, Catherine E Lhamon.

Catherine E Lhamon

BRYAN BEDDER/GETTY IMAGES

She has been replaced temporarily by Craig Trainor, who was arrested and charged with drink-driving in Manhattan in 2010. “We slyly referred to him as our DUI hire,” the former supervisor said.

Trainor did not respond to a request for comment. The Department of Education denied that he was unqualified for the role, noting he had years of experience as a civil rights attorney.

In addition to Trainor, four men are leading the OCR, three of whom are white. The youngest, David Samberg, graduated law school in 2023. A former senior supervisor said he was “barely out of diapers” and “not qualified to advise anyone on anything … None of these appointees have the experience or qualifications that any non-Trump administration would require, and many of them have no relevant experience at all.”

In response to this the department cited Samberg’s role drafting two reports on college campus antisemitism for Congress. It said: “Both of these reports were the basis of the congressional hearing which caused the most prominent American university presidents, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay and UPenn’s President Elizabeth Magill, to resign after delivering unsatisfactory testimonies about their handling of antisemitism that the reports exposed.”

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It added that the agency as a whole was “composed of top performing personnel with years of experience”.

Despite accusations of favouring men, Trump has nominated a woman, Kim Richey, to permanently replace Trainor once she is confirmed. Richey served as acting head of the OCR at the end of Trump’s first term before being replaced by Lhamon in November 2021.

Kim Richey

CIVIC MEDIA

‘I wasn’t expecting it to be this extreme’

The overhaul of the agency is part of a wider transformation of the Department of Education, which Trump is gutting to cut costs and stamp out “gender ideology” and antisemitism in public schools and universities. About a third of the department’s 4,100-strong education workforce has been fired.

• What does the Department of Education do and will it be dismantled?

Six present and former department employees described their shock at the speed and extent of the administration’s purge, in which staff have been placed on full paid leave for several months without explanation, entire offices have been shut and sensitive student data has been handed to immigration authorities.

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“I worked through the first Trump administration — I wasn’t expecting it to be this extreme,” said one former employee of Federal Student Aid, another office within the education department that oversees the nation’s student loan programme. “It’s incredibly sinister what is happening.”

In the past, high school students born to migrant parents in the US applied for a college loan with the Federal Student Aid office by submitting their family’s personal data, knowing it would not be shared with immigration officials. Now, student aid employees are being forced to hand over this information to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a source told The Times.

“I know that Federal Student Aid were running reports of people who were receiving aid and who their relatives might be,” the former worker said. “We never did this before.” The Department of Education declined to comment on this allegation.

Scores of staff left in paid limbo

Critics of the Department of Education claim it has ballooned in size and cost over the years without improving student outcomes. Trump is reducing expenditure across the department’s 17 offices and the government plans to relocate some of their functions to other departments.

More than $6 billion in federal funding for after-school programmes, teacher development, adult education and services for English learners was withheld by the government on July 1 as part of a spending review. It was released weeks later after a backlash from Trump supporters — but other cuts are still going ahead.

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Trump has told Linda McMahon, the education secretary, that her mission is to “put herself out of a job”. Completely closing the department, however, would require an act of Congress. Insiders said it would cost millions to transfer the department’s remaining functions to other agencies, as the administration has recommended.

Linda McMahon, whose background is in the promotion of professional wrestling, entered office in March

BEN CURTIS/AP

“There’s not going to be any efficiency created in this,” said one worker from the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education, which also falls under the umbrella of the education department.

Scores of staff, meanwhile, remain on full paid administrative leave, with no indication whether they will be fired or brought back to work, department sources told The Times. The administration has been spending more than $7 million a month to keep staff on leave, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, a federal workers’ union.

One senior manager working in the OCR was placed on leave in March “without warning” after she complained to bosses that cuts to the office’s IT and human resources staff had hampered her team’s ability to function, a source said. Another department insider said she had been put on leave in January, alongside 73 others, as part of a DEI review.

“It disgusts me,” she said. “We’re being paid to stay away from our work. I only found out a week ago that they want me back. It’s a complete mess.”

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Of the 1,300 people who have been fired throughout the Department of Education, a majority are thought to have been cut from the OCR.

‘Maga parents need help too’

Seven of the OCR’s 12 offices across the country have been shut, leaving staff in the five remaining offices — in Seattle, Denver, Kansas City, Atlanta and Washington — overwhelmed, according to one official who has been placed on administrative leave but remains employed by the office. Active cases from the closed offices are either being dropped or handed over to the OCR’s remaining teams.

“I reckon 80 per cent of cases, maybe more, aren’t being looked at,” the official said.

The former senior supervisor said complaints against trans athletes in women’s sport or alleged discrimination against white men were more likely to be “fast-tracked”. This was no surprise, she added, given the people who are now leading the civil rights office.

Schoolchildren watched Trump sign an order to gut the education department on March 20

NATHAN HOWARD/REUTERS

Meanwhile, both sources from the OCR said the majority of their work focused on disability complaints rather than gender ideology.

“It was everything from, ‘My kid is in a wheelchair and the elevator has been broken for a month and they can’t get to the cafeteria’, to ‘My child has a very rare form of dyslexia and needs a specialised support programme,’” the former supervisor said. “Disability is a very bipartisan topic. Even Maga parents have kids with disabilities who need help. So these cuts are going to affect these families as much as they do Democrats.”

The Department of Education said it had opened 20 complaints for investigation in the past week, nine of which were disability related, and that the OCR resolved six disability-related complaints in the past week.

Julie Hartman, a spokeswoman for the department, said the OCR under Biden had misused resources “intended to combat discrimination” and instead “protected racial exclusion, permitted schools to push gender ideology on students, and even fought to keep sexually explicit material in school libraries.”

She added: “The Trump administration has reoriented enforcement to protect students and families, and it is now working to reform a broken federal bureaucracy.”