Inside Higher Education: Trump Administration Attempts to Rush Changes to Civil Rights Regs

June 16. 2025

Senior Managing Attorney Maha Ibrahim is featured in an Inside Higher Education article about the Trump Administration’s attempts to sneakily change Title IX civil rights by issuing unlawful Direct Federal Rules through the Dept. of Energy (rather then the Education Department).

DFRs are meant to be used only in cases of routine and/or administrative rule changes — never substantive, controversial, or civil-rights related proposals.

“The things they’ve submitted to this DFR process are clearly controversial and significant on their face. No matter what side you’re on, no matter what you think, you wouldn’t be like, ‘that’s no big deal,’” said Ibrahim. “I’m not in the administration; I can’t tell you for sure this is what their purpose [is], but we’re very afraid, as civil rights organizations, that this is an intentional misapplication of the DFR process to try to avoid public scrutiny, to try to do these things through the back door.”

…

“It’s creating a record, and that record will help in the lawsuits,” said Ibrahim. “They might ignore it, and if they ignore it, there’ll be good grounds to sue. And there’ll be all these great comments from the public who care about these things that show they illegally ignored it.”

Read the article.