We are winning. My team just helped win a major victory for a whistleblower, a Missourian, who exposed the Biden Department of Education’s defiance of a federal court order to keep forcing radical gender ideology on American schools.
This fight started when I was Missouri Attorney General. This was a big win. We have to keep fighting to make sure the bureaucrats are held accountable.
Here's what happened.
In 2021, the Biden Administration tried to rewrite Title IX by decree. The Department issued guidance claiming that a law enacted to protect women and girls also required schools to adopt the Left’s gender-identity agenda.
Missouri fought back. We joined twenty states in court, and in 2022, a federal judge blocked the Department from enforcing that guidance in the covered states.
That should have settled the matter. A federal court had spoken. The Department had its order.
Biden’s Office for Civil Rights kept moving anyway.
OCR leadership continued opening, mediating, investigating, and resolving cases built on the same gender-identity theory the court had blocked. Their workaround was simple: avoid citing the forbidden documents while continuing to enforce the substance of what those documents said.
Career officials in Kansas City understood what was happening and refused to participate. Rather than respect their duty to follow the law, OCR leadership pressured them, routed cases around them, and told them not to put disagreements in writing.
Then a whistleblower brought evidence to my Senate office, and we pressed for answers.
The Department’s first report tried to wave the whole thing away. It claimed the whistleblower misunderstood the injunction and that OCR had done nothing wrong. That story collapsed under scrutiny.
The Department was forced to reverse course, and the Office of Special Counsel has now confirmed that the whistleblower’s allegations were fully substantiated.
So here is the record.
I fought this as Missouri Attorney General. I stayed on it as Senator. And now the Biden Department of Education has been forced to admit that OCR defied a federal court order so it could keep imposing a radical gender-identity mandate on American schools.
This is why oversight matters.
The administrative state cannot rewrite federal law, ignore federal courts, punish career officials for obeying the law, and turn Title IX into a weapon for gender ideology.
This is a victory for the rule of law, for the whistleblower, for the states that fought back, and for every parent, student, and school district that should never have been targeted by this lawless bureaucracy in the first place.
Now the Department of Education needs to finish the job.
It should identify the officials who directed, approved, assisted, participated in, or concealed this misconduct; impose discipline where warranted; audit every affected OCR case in the covered states; protect the whistleblower and every career official who followed the law; and give Congress and the American people the full truth.
Court orders bind bureaucrats too.