Biden poised to reverse Trump-era Title IX rules
The Biden administration on Friday finalized a long-awaited overhaul of Title IX, the decades-old federal law that protects students from sex- and gender-based discrimination.
The rules will reverse Trump-era policies that critics say for years have bolstered the rights of people accused of sexual assault on school campuses. When Joe Biden was running for president, he described his predecessors’ Title IX regulations as a “green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their rights.”
Under the new policy, colleges will be allowed to use a lower standard to find someone guilty of sexual misconduct. The federal government will also raise its expectations of schools across the country by requiring them to quickly respond to all types of sex-based discrimination – not just to sexual harassment, which is the current threshold.
And colleges will do away with a controversial requirement for live hearings, including potentially traumatic cross-examinations between victims and those they accuse of sex-based misconduct.
It’s a change that victims’ rights advocates have been eagerly pushing since Biden took office. The rule spent years wading through government red tape – it still hasn’t fully cleared all the bureaucratic hurdles – and was announced months after the Education Department originally said it would be finalized.
The regulations will also officially expand the rights of LGBTQ+ students and staff, setting in stone definitions that will protect people who identify as queer and transgender from harassment or discrimination in any school that receives federal funding. Pregnant students will be better protected under the new rules as well.
The regulations will take effect Aug. 1, the Education Department said, and will apply to complaints that occurred on or after that date.
The announcement fulfills one of
Biden’s key campaign promises – though not until the tail end of his first term. While opponents of the Trumpera rules have praised the Biden administration for moving to reverse them, frustration at the government’s pace has soured even supporters of the president’s efforts.
Depending on the outcome of the general election this November, a potential second Trump term would likely start the process of reversing the standards mere months after they take effect.
The Biden administration is also separately aiming to curtail schools’ abilities to prevent transgender athletes from competing in sports. In a different rule released in April 2023, officials suggested a nuanced approach to allowing trans students to play on teams consistent with their gender identity, with some exceptions.
The involvement of transgender students in school sports has become a politically salient culture-war issue in recent years amid a broader conservative-led campaign to restrict the rights of people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth.
When asked Thursday whether concerns about the election have influenced the timeline for the regulation on trans athletes, the Education Department declined to comment.
WASHINGTON – Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee launched a program on Friday to combat voter fraud in the leadup to the November election, even as voting irregularities have proved extremely rare in the United States.
The RNC and the Trump campaign said they were preparing to deploy more than 100,000 attorneys and volunteers across the states that are expected to be competitive in the presidential race.
The Republican Party and the Trump campaign said in a statement that they plan to recruit an army of poll watchers, who will monitor individual polling sites for irregularities.
Attorneys, meanwhile, will be stationed at “Republican Party War Rooms” in competitive states, where they will staff an “Election Integrity Hotline” to answer calls from poll watchers and voters who have observed possible irregularities.
“Having the right people to count the ballots is just as important as turning out voters on Election Day,” Trump said in a statement.
“Republicans are now working together to protect the vote and ensure a big win on November 5th!”
The RNC ran a voter integrity program during the 2022 congressional elections, though the 2024 effort appears to represent a significant step up in terms of its scope and ambition.
During this election cycle, the RNC has already engaged in 82 lawsuits in 25 states related to election integrity, the committee said in the Friday statement.
Since launching his reelection campaign in late 2022, Trump has continued to falsely claim he lost the 2020 election due to widespread voter fraud, despite a lack of supporting evidence and dozens of failed lawsuits seeking to establish foul play.
Echoed by many of his allies in Congress, Trump’s false claims about voter fraud have been absorbed broadly by the Republican electorate, a majority of which does not believe Biden was legitimately elected, according to opinion polls.
On the campaign trail, Trump has sought to portray Democratic voters as chronic cheaters who cannot be trusted.
During a speech in Iowa in December, he told supporters to be ready to “guard the vote” in Democratic-run cities, and more recently he has demanded his backers vote in such large numbers as to render the election “too big to rig” by the Democrats.
The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
While most Republican poll watchers have conducted themselves peacefully, there have been many reports of alleged intimidation by poll watchers in recent elections that have drawn the attention of election officials in competitive states, including North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.