On its first day in office, the Trump Administration issued Executive Orders (EOs) to terminate all diversity, inclusion, and accessibility programs across the federal government and allow only two genders to be recognized. The US Department of Education (ED) quickly released guidance detailing how it is implementing this order by canceling all diversity, inclusion, and accessibility contacts totaling, placing all career staff who were working on diversity, equity, and inclusion on administrative leave, removing diversity, inclusion, and accessibility-related web pages from ED’s site, dissolving the ED’s Diversity and Inclusion Council, and more.

On Friday, February 14, the Office for Civil Rights at ED published a Dear Colleague letter prohibiting schools that receive federal funding, including preschools, elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions, as well as state agencies, from using race-based considerations in any aspect of programming or operations. ED followed this guidance with an FAQ document, released on March 1, 2025, that details the agency’s expansive interpretation of the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard Supreme Court decision from 2023.

The American Council on Education and other prominent higher education associations wrote a letter, calling on ED to rescind the Dear Colleague, “and work to promulgate guidance that reflects existing law.” The letter states that the Dear Colleague “does not have the force and effect of law and does not bind the public or create new legal standards,” and that “it is unreasonable for the Department to require institutions to appropriately respond to this extremely broad reinterpretation of federal law in a mere two weeks and in the absence of necessary guidance.”

On February 27, ED announced the creation of new portal where the public can make complaints about diversity, inclusion, and accessibility practices in K-12 public schools. The portal comes at the end of the two-week period allowed to educational institutions to rid themselves of diversity, inclusion, and accessibility programming, as stated in the Dear Colleague.

Read More:

• Five Takeaways from ED’s FAQ on the Diversity/Inclusion Dear Colleague
• FAFSA Sex Question and FSA ID Changes
• Trump Administration Forbids Schools, Agencies in Considering Race in Programming and Operations
• Breaking Down Trump’s Executive Orders