Title IX has protected student athletes for over fifty years. If the Trump administration dismantles the Department of Education, students and experts worry those protections could go with it.
On March 11th, the United States Department of Education initiated a “reduction in force,” putting around 50% of its workforce on administrative leave days before President Donald Trump made an executive order proposing to cut the department altogether.
The executive order, “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities,” proposes to shut down the Department of Education to “provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them.”
Title IX is enforced under the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). This title provides students protection against sex discrimination and protection on the basis of gender identity, according to the OCR. In athletics, it ensures equality between male and female athletes, including the equal distribution of funds between them. As of right now, there is no clear answer as to how the new administration will oversee Title IX if the Department of Education is eliminated by the executive order.
USC Professor of Education Morgan Polikoff said he worries the Trump Administration “is going to do a lot more investigating of women transgender athletes and women’s sports, and a lot less investigating of sexual assault on college campuses.”
To navigate the uncertainty, Polikoff said universities should “look at what they did in the last administration, and use the last time they were in charge as a guide.”
“We don’t know what will happen, but at the same time, it’s very predictable,” Polikoff said.
Polikoff said it can be safe to assume that there will be a narrowed focus on transgender athletes, especially after Trump announced an executive order titled “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” on February 5. The order aims to “rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.” According to the executive order, if a school has a transgender female on a women’s team, the university violates the current guidelines set by Title IX and will lose its funding.
“USC will always remain committed to supporting all of our student-athletes and athletics programs,” wrote the university in a statement to Annenberg Media.
This further raises questions about protections for college athletes, which Title IX has upheld for half a century. If Title IX disappears with the Department of Education, the future of lower revenue sports and LGBTQ+ representation remains unknown.
Paige McDaniel Dash, a former athlete on USC’s swim and dive team, said her experience is an example of how Title IX supports female athletes in low-revenue sports.
“Title IX gave me the opportunity to choose my school that I wanted to go to, and to compete at the highest level, finishing my education as promised on a full ride for five years,” Dash said. “[Swimming] is very popular during the Olympic year, but in the off-season, people don’t really follow it like they would basketball or football.”
Because of Title IX, money made from USC’s football program is redistributed to teams like women’s swim and track and field, said Dash.
“To me, it is more of a revenue sport versus a non-revenue sport [issue] than a men’s versus women’s issue,” said Kate Hoppe, a former swimmer at UCLA. “It makes me sad that they cut so many of the men’s Olympic sports [at UCLA], like they cut men’s swimming, but I get that they’re trying to be equal between men and females.”
If Title IX disappears with the Department of Education, the power of these high-revenue sports may go unchecked. A preview of what could happen played out at Loyola Marymount University last January, when the school cut six of its sports programs due to the “shifting of financial resources,” according to a university statement to ABC 7 Los Angeles.
“It was just shocking,” said Ellie Davis, a swimmer for LMU’s women’s team before the program was cut. Davis said it was a “random Tuesday” when the athletic director announced to the six teams that they were no longer athletes for the university, but could continue their academic careers if they so chose.
According to Davis, the teams cut were women’s swim, men’s and women’s rowing, men’s cross country, and men’s and women’s track.
“They kept women’s cross country to satisfy the Title IX requirement because they had higher funding than women’s rowing and women’s swimming,” Davis said.
“They can’t keep these programs alive because they have to pay their football players and basketball players a wage now,” said Hoppe. “I worry that schools that aren’t in a power four conference don’t have as much money either. That’s going to hurt schools like [UC Santa Barbara], LMU, and [the University of San Diego].”
The power four conferences have more money to support lower-revenue sports.
“Everyone’s so money-oriented nowadays that they don’t look at the bigger picture, which is really sad,” Davis said.