What’s New
The Justice Department said on Tuesday it will no longer investigate accusations of systemic racism or sexism, drastically limiting how college students, parents, and employees can accuse a university of discrimination without proof of intent.
Officials said they would eliminate disparate-impact liability from its Title VI rules, a decades-old legal concept that allows individuals to claim that race- and sex-neutral policies are discriminatory if they disproportionately harm certain groups or result in significant disparities. Tuesday’s announcement continues the Trump administration’s efforts to upend the ways college leaders have traditionally defined and addressed discrimination.
“Our rejection of this theory will restore true equality under the law by requiring proof of actual discrimination, rather than enforcing race- or sex-based quotas or assumptions,” Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil-rights division, said in a statement.
The Details
Disparate-impact liability has been recognized as a rule in Title VI of the Civil Rights Act since the early 1970s. In the years since, people of color and women have used data to claim that the government or college leaders should address policies and practices that yield disparate outcomes.
For example, a professor could argue that administrators’ hiring practices have resulted in low representation of women and people of color among faculty.
In Tuesday’s statement, Trump-administration officials said that disparate-impact regulations cause confusion, “costly compliance,” and result in recipients of federal funding being unfairly assessed during investigations of alleged race- and sex-based discrimination.
“The Department’s new rule ensures that recipients of federal funding will be judged on their actual conduct, not on statistical outcomes or circumstances beyond their control,” the department said in the statement.
Notably, while the Justice Department said it would stop investigating accusations of systemic race and sex-based discrimination, it failed to mention how it would handle accusations of antisemitism. The department has accused several colleges of antisemitism for the ways they have handled protests against the war in Gaza.
Antonio Ingram II, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said the rule change creates “troubling framing” for how the department will determine what discrimination looks like.
“It allows institutions to turn a blind eye to troubling statistics just because they didn’t mean to do it,” Ingram said.
Under the rule change, Ingram said, students and parents looking to file discrimination complaints with the Justice Department will need a “smoking gun,” like a memorandum or a written policy with clear intent to discriminate.
“This is 2025. Most examples of discrimination based on race or sex are not going to be what we saw in the Jim Crow south,” Ingram said.
The Backdrop
President Trump in April signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to end the use of disparate-impact liability. In a statement then, Trump called the legal concept “wholly inconsistent with the Constitution” and a threat to merit and equal opportunity.
The regulation update comes amid several changes to the Justice Department’s civil-rights division. Since January, the department has lost about 75 percent of its attorneys due to layoffs and resignations.
In an open letter on Tuesday, more than 200 former DOJ employees criticized the Trump administration’s handling of civil-rights investigations.
“Rather than rigorously evaluating the evidence to pursue only the most egregious cases,” the former employees wrote, “they demanded that we find facts to fit the Administration’s predetermined outcomes.”
