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A Department of Education report made public Wednesday said whistleblower Timothy Mattson’s allegations were substantiated and that senior civil rights officials worked around a federal injunction.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A Department of Education report made public Wednesday concluded that senior Biden administration officials worked to sidestep a 2022 federal court order blocking enforcement of guidance that interpreted Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination to include gender identity.
The findings, reported by Just the News, substantiate allegations brought by whistleblower Timothy Mattson, who now leads the Department of Education Office for Civil Rights’ regional office in Kansas City.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel told President Donald Trump that the Department of Education “fully substantiated the allegations” raised by Mattson. The office also recommended sanctions against current and former officials and compensation for Mattson because of the risks he took in coming forward.
“OSC has reviewed the disclosure, agency reports, and whistleblower comments,” Charles Baldis, the agency’s chief counsel, wrote in a four-page letter to Trump. Baldis said the office “determined that the reports contain the information required by statute and that the findings appear reasonable.”
The department’s Feb. 19 supplemental report was ordered after the Trump administration’s OSC revisited the matter. The report followed an earlier Biden-era OSC review, released shortly before the presidential transition, that had dismissed Mattson’s allegations.
The supplemental report repeatedly names then-Office for Civil Rights Director Catherine Lhamon as a central figure in directing Mattson and others to continue enforcing gender-identity-related guidance despite a federal injunction.
“OCR’s leadership actively engaged in efforts to thwart at least one OCR regional office (Region VII) [Kansas City] from following the plain and unambiguous meaning of the order” issued by U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley, the supplemental report said. Atchley, a Trump nominee, had blocked enforcement of the guidance in states that sued the federal government.
The dispute centers on whether the Biden administration’s Office for Civil Rights treated nonbinding guidance as enforceable law. Critics had long accused Lhamon’s office, which she led during both the Obama and Biden administrations as assistant secretary for civil rights, of pressuring K-12 schools and colleges with threats to federal funding if they did not follow the administration’s interpretation of Title IX.
According to the supplemental report, Lhamon stated days after Atchley’s order that she planned to disregard advice from her own general counsel and the Justice Department while determining OCR’s response to the injunction. The Biden-era OSC report had claimed Mattson misunderstood the scope of the court order.
A year and a half later, Mattson told OSC that Lhamon may have violated the injunction by pursuing an investigation of Oklahoma’s Owasso Public Schools after the suicide of nonbinary student Nex Benedict. That investigation cited “gender identity” as a basis for enforcement, according to reporting cited in the case. Mattson also alleged Lhamon “threatened adverse personnel actions” against him after he refused what he considered an illegal order.
The supplemental report redacts Mattson’s name throughout, but the identifiers point to him. Empower Oversight, the whistleblower advocacy organization representing Mattson, publicly identified him as the whistleblower during a video discussion Wednesday.
Empower had previously criticized the Trump administration for delays in updating the investigation. OSC asked the Department of Education in February 2025 for a supplemental report after Mattson submitted a critical response to the initial report.
Empower President Tristan Leavitt said the Biden administration defied the injunction by pushing its gender-identity interpretation on school districts.
The administration flouted the court order by “forcing their gender ideology views on local school districts, and in many cases by bullying them into consent decrees or other agreements when those local school districts were under threat of investigation by the federal government,” Leavitt said Wednesday.
Mattson said he is willing to testify if called.
“I will testify either in court or before Congress if I’m called to do that,” Mattson said. “I did not set out to be a whistleblower, but as Edmund Burke said, the only thing that’s required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
Bobby Cheren, senior counsel at Empower Oversight, told Just the News that OSC’s recommendation for punishments, including possible removals, is “as close to calling for firings as you’re going to see from the OSC.”
Lhamon joined the University of California Berkeley School of Law after leaving the Biden administration. The school has promoted her Associated Press interview about what she called the Trump administration’s higher education “performance art,” referring to high-profile investigations by the current administration. Berkeley Law did not answer questions Wednesday about the supplemental report’s characterization of Lhamon, who leads its Edley Center on Law & Democracy.
The supplemental report was sharply critical of the earlier Biden-era review of Mattson’s allegations, characterizing parts of that investigation as incomplete, evasive and misleading.
The department said the earlier report failed to “more accurately assess readily available materials, conduct additional interviews, and forthrightly respond” to Mattson’s core allegation that Lhamon’s OCR deliberately defied the injunction.
“It appears that the WB’s assertions are accurate,” the supplemental report said regarding the first three questions Trump’s OSC asked the Department of Education to examine.
The report said the department apparently did not interview key personnel before submitting its December 2024 response to OSC, including staff in the Chicago, Atlanta and Cleveland OCR regional offices, all of which were subject to Atchley’s injunction. A newly interviewed staffer told the general counsel’s office that Lhamon threatened his job and Mattson’s if they did not comply.
Another redacted staffer recalled a virtual meeting in which Lhamon said, in paraphrase, that “the preliminary injunction really doesn’t accomplish anything” because OCR does not enforce “guidance.” The staffer also said Lhamon was “persuaded” not to put her directive in writing.
“The record indicates that Assistant Secretary Lhamon had, at this point, made clear her evolving intent to defy the court’s order and had begun the process of forcing her OCR subordinates to adopt her posture – and to do so without creating a written record in opposition to or further legal consideration of that effort,” the report said.
The report said corrective action continued to be proposed in additional cases identified by Mattson even though the injunction prohibited that enforcement in covered states. It also said cases from Kansas City were transferred to what one deputy assistant secretary called “more compliant” offices in Chicago and Seattle after Kansas City staff tried to balance legal obligations with headquarters directives.
The supplemental report also confirmed Mattson’s allegation that the initial report omitted important material he had supplied, including a detailed memorandum from the Kansas City regional director to the department’s general counsel.
That memorandum described specific instructions from Lhamon and another OCR enforcement official on how to open and investigate sexual orientation and gender identity matters despite the injunction, the report said. The memo was “inexplicably” left out of the first report and was not cited even once.
According to the memo, Lhamon speculated after the injunction that only she and senior staff could face legal consequences for continuing SOGI investigations. If field staff were found in contempt and fined, the memo said, Lhamon offered to pay their legal representation and fines either through the department or personally.
In a later virtual meeting, OCR leadership reportedly repeated similar instructions after announcing a “one-week pause on all SOGI cases across all 50 states” while awaiting new guidance from Lhamon. One official said headquarters was “trying to minimize communications in writing because this is just more stuff for [legal] discovery.”
The supplemental report also accused the 2024 report of relying on a distinction between complying with the Justice Department’s “notice of compliance” in ongoing litigation and complying with Atchley’s injunction itself. That distinction, the report said, allowed OCR to continue pursuing SOGI matters in plaintiff states during “the weeks, months, and years” after the order.
The report said the earlier review also repeated “Lhamon’s attack” on Atchley’s injunction, even though that order had been affirmed by an appeals court.
Months after the injunction, Lhamon formalized a position that OCR would not use the specific guidance documents blocked by the court but would continue its statutory duties without relying on those documents to determine what Title IX and related regulations mean.
The supplemental report concluded that the department’s review, including additional interviews and materials not cited in the first report, gave reason to believe OCR leadership created a way to continue implementing its preferred SOGI policies in states covered by the injunction.
The report said that path used “precisely” the gender-identity interpretation of Title IX forbidden by Atchley’s order.
The findings are likely to intensify scrutiny of the Biden administration’s Title IX enforcement strategy and raise new questions about whether federal civil rights officials attempted to evade a court order while limiting the written record of their actions.
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