Its muscular approach sets it apart from previous Republican administrations.
Its muscular approach sets it apart from previous Republican administrations.
E arlier this month, a federal judge dismissed the Trump administration’s civil-rights case against Harvard, the latest judicial rebuke of an administration accustomed to pushing legal boundaries. But what is remarkable here is not the pushback. It is that a Republican administration is pushing the boundaries of federal civil-rights enforcement at all.
The administration has mobilized agencies across the government, allowing the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to assume a leading role in higher-education matters once left largely to the Department of Education. And it has pursued the ultimate civil-rights sanction — the complete withdrawal of federal funding in many cases — with a determination that Washington has not displayed in decades. In its whole-of-government coordination, and the sheer force of its remedies, the second Trump administration has distinguished itself from every previous Republican administration in our lifetime.
Skeptics will say that every administration promises to remake civil-rights enforcement but eventually settles back into the same tired grooves. Supporters will argue that Trump 2.o’s civil-rights officials are merely enforcing the laws as written, no more and no less. But three substantive changes make this administration’s approach unique.
The first distinguishing feature of the second Trump administration is what might be called civil-rights maximalism. From its earliest days in power, the Trump-led Education Department began proactively opening investigations rather than waiting for complaints, especially in priority areas such as antisemitism, DEI, and women’s athletics. Previous Republican administrations often took a minimalist approach — wary of expanding the administrative state, upsetting the separation of powers, intruding on federalism, or stretching civil-rights statutes beyond their text.
Those concerns were principled, but the resulting asymmetry was unmistakable: Democratic administrations energetically advanced progressive priorities through doctrines such as disparate impact, while Republican administrations often contented themselves with avoiding excesses of their own. Civil-rights enforcement therefore moved three steps left under Democrats, paused under Republicans, and then resumed its leftward march. Trump 2.0 is breaking that pattern by applying the same proactive energy to conservative civil-rights priorities.
The clearest evidence of how aggressively the administration is using its enforcement authority is money. The administration’s aggressive withholding of federal funds from Harvard, Columbia, and other major universities has no real precedent. Further, it has aimed that weaponry at a different set of targets — e.g., widespread antisemitism, race-conscious admissions — and with more force.
The Justice Department’s new Civil Rights Fraud Initiative turns the False Claims Act on universities that certify civil-rights compliance while quietly tolerating antisemitism or illegal DEI practices. In February, DOJ’s Civil Rights Division sued the University of California directly, alleging UCLA allowed a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff based on a commissioner’s charge brought proactively by Andrea Lucas, the bold and energetic chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
Second, under this administration, DOJ, HHS, the EEOC, and even the General Services Administration (GSA) have all become central players. The White House has taken a more direct coordinating role, urging agencies to identify the full range of authorities available to combat antisemitism and directing them to target potentially unlawful DEI policies. The clearest example of this change is the GSA, a procurement agency that many outside of the Beltway have likely never heard of. But its Federal Acquisition Service flagged $255 million in Harvard’s federal contracts for termination amid concerns over antisemitism and joined the DOJ, HHS, and the Department of Education in canceling $400 million in Columbia’s grants and contracts outright over allegations of antisemitism. It was the GSA’s contracting capabilities that enabled these sweeping moves, something no single office could have accomplished on its own.
While the Biden administration produced the first U.S. national strategy to combat antisemitism, logging more than 100 actions across more than two dozen federal agencies, most of those actions were forgettable, such as producing training modules and holding listening sessions. The agencies that mattered were, for the most part, the Department of Education and, to a lesser extent, the State Department. The second Trump administration has delivered the coordination Biden’s strategy only gestured toward.
The third departure is the administration’s more muscular and proactive approach to targeted civil-rights enforcement. The Department of Education has begun conducting proactive compliance reviews — opening investigation files without waiting for a complaint to land first — across antisemitism, DEI, and affirmative action alike. Prior Republican administrations reserved targeted enforcement mostly for causes with broad, bipartisan appeal, such as disability access on college campuses and better diagnostic practices for minority students in special education. Other administrations spent much of their energies clearing backlogs of cases left behind by their predecessors — a bureaucratic goal, not a substantive one.
This administration is targeting core conservative concerns directly and is following through. In July, the EEOC’s $21 million settlement with Columbia became the largest EEOC settlement for victims of antisemitism in the agency’s 60-year history and the largest public settlement of any kind reached in nearly two decades. That came alongside a separate $200 million settlement with the federal government requiring Columbia to submit to an independent monitor overseeing its admissions and hiring practices and to restructure its disciplinary process. Those are systemic changes.
For a bloated federal government that is used to incremental change that takes the entire lifespan of administrations or longer to concretize, this maximalist approach might be seen by some as rash. But what is truly short-sighted is for the federal government to allow the civil-rights enforcement powers it possesses to atrophy as many institutions disregard their legal obligations. The Trump administration’s proactive and muscular approach to civil rights takes the moment with the seriousness it demands. Future administrations should treat Trump’s maximalism as a baseline and use the tools they have to protect every American’s civil rights with strong resolve.