The U.S. Department of Energy delayed implementation of multiple rules that it had quietly set to go into effect this week for colleges and schools that receive funding from the agency. The move comes in response to public pushback to proposed policy changes.
The department said it was extending the effective dates for several direct final rules from July 15 to Sept. 12, 2025. The proposals would have undone some student protections related to sex discrimination under Title IX, disability discrimination under Section 504, and racial discrimination under Title VI.
One direct final rule, for example, would have no longer required schools to offer girls tryouts for boys' teams in noncontact sports if the school didn’t have an equivalent girls’ team. Another would have removed protections allowing gender-conscious after-school programs or college initiatives to provide women and girls opportunities they have historically been denied, such as in STEM fields or in technical training.
Had the public not responded to the direct final rules with "significant adverse comments," the rules would have undone such protections within a 30-day period — a much shorter timeline than the typical rulemaking process, which requires federal agencies to consider public feedback and make changes to their policy proposals accordingly.
The Trump administration's decision to undo civil rights protections for students using expedited rulemaking — a process usually reserved for rules agencies expect to be uncontroversial — alarmed many civil rights organizations.
Kel O'Hara, senior attorney for policy and education equity at Equal Rights Advocate, called the move a "backdoor elimination of student protections."
"The Trump Administration tried to exploit an obscure regulatory loophole meant only for minor administrative updates to gut fundamental protections for female athletes and transgender students," O'Hara said in a Wednesday statement.
Typical rulemaking would require a public notice and comment period, and a second version of the rule that takes into consideration changes based on public feedback. That process also gives school districts more time to prepare for policy changes.
The rules were also atypical in that they were released by the Energy Department rather than the U.S. Department of Education — meaning only schools receiving Energy Department funding would have been impacted by this set of changes. The Energy Department gave 28 schools just over $160 million in fiscal year 2025, and provides over $2.5 billion annually to more than 300 colleges and universities to fund research.
However, had significant adverse comments not been received and delayed these rules’ implementation, and had the Energy Department been successful in its approach, the administration could have replicated the expedited method through other federal agencies to set education policies in many more schools, education policy experts predicted.
“This is a paradigm shift on the part of how the federal government articulates and connects some of these tools to their education priorities,” said Kenneth Wong, a professor of education policy at Brown University, when the direct final rules were announced. “Basically every single school, in practically every single school district, has some grants from one of the many agencies in the federal government."
Most schools receive K-12 funding from multiple agencies, such as the Energy Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Because of the opposition to the rules, the Energy Department must now either withdraw them entirely or issue new final rules by September 12 that take the comments into account.
The Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
