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Whistleblower alleges Biden officials ignored a court order
Three months ago, watchdog organization Empower Oversight made public a whistleblower’s allegations that a high-ranking Department of Education official under President Joe Biden continued to investigate schools that banned gender-confused males from women’s spaces despite a court injunction.
As of yet, however, there has been no word on whether the Trump administration is looking into the allegations.
Tristan Leavitt, president of Empower Oversight, told The College Fix last week that accountability hinges on the current administration.
“When 20 states sued to stop the Biden Department of Education from imposing its radical Title IX gender identity guidance on their local school districts, a federal judge enjoined the Department from enforcing the guidance in those states. But the Education Department ignored that injunction, bullying local parents and school districts into submission,” Leavitt said.
“Anyone still at the Department who disregarded the court order should be held accountable—but that accountability hinges on the Administration finishing the statutorily required investigation and report,” he told The Fix.
However, despite multiple attempts over the past month, neither the Department of Education’s media relations office nor its Office of Special Counsel responded to The Fix’s questions about looking into the whistleblower’s allegation and revisiting the Biden administration’s investigation.
Meanwhile, Chairman of the U.S. House Education Committee Tim Walberg, while not commenting directly on the whistleblower’s allegations or the calls for an investigation, told The Fix recently that both he and Trump are working to end the previous administration’s “radical gender ideology.”
“The Biden-Harris administration spent years rewriting Title IX, sacrificing protections and opportunities for women in favor of radical gender ideology,” Walberg said in a recent statement via email.
“President Trump rejected the absurd claim that biological men can be considered women. I’m grateful that this administration is restoring common sense and protecting Title IX—work this Committee has been leading from day one,” the Republican congressman said.
The whistleblower claims that Catherine Lhamon, former assistant secretary for the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights under Biden, and others in the department ignored a 2022 court injunction against the administration’s Title IX changes.
Whistleblower Timothy Mattson, an attorney in the office, alleges Lhamon and others continued to pressure schools to conform to the “gender identity and sexual orientation” additions to the anti-discrimination law despite the court order.
Previously, the Biden administration’s Office of Special Counsel reviewed the whistleblower’s allegations and found them to be unsubstantiated.
But Empower Oversight has been calling on the Trump Administration to revisit the investigation since October.
“There needs to be a full accounting of how the Biden administration ignored this court order and all the school districts that it put into fear by opening all these investigations they weren’t supposed to open,” Leavitt told The Fix at the time.
In October, it published Mattson’s 2024 complaint, which alleges, among other things, that a former department secretary “subtly threatened a personnel action” against him for raising concerns about the 2022 court injunction and the office continuing to investigate complaints.
Mattson’s complaint to the U.S. Office of Special Counsel alleges his department continued to open and investigate these cases, which put pressure on schools and colleges to comply with the Biden administration’s views on gender.
Cases included an Alaska school district that banned male athletes who claim to be female from girls’ sports, according to the complaint.
The College Fix reached out to Lhamon for comment multiple times via email over the past month, but did not receive a response.
Lhamon, who left the department in 2025, now works for the University of California at Berkeley Law as executive director of its Edley Center on Law and Democracy. Her expertise includes “Gender and Sexuality” and “Racial and Social Justice.”
Previously, UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky expressed confidence in Lhamon’s record and called the whistleblower’s allegations “unsubstantiated” in a statement to The Fix.
As The Fix previously reported, the whistleblower’s complaint mentions several cases in which Lhamon and others in the office allegedly ignored the court order.
One involved the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in Alaska. Allegedly, despite the court injunction, the Biden administration investigated the school board for “taking action to limit membership of girls’ athletics teams to students who were assigned female at birth.”
Other cases mentioned include incidents of alleged “gender identity” or “transgender” discrimination at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana and Oberlin College in Ohio.
Last year, a federal judge in Kentucky struck down the Biden Administration’s changes to Title IX. After taking office last year, Trump changed the interpretation of the anti-discrimination law back to the language used before the categorical additions of the Biden Administration.
MORE: Biden official kept enforcing ‘gender identity’ rule despite court order: whistleblower
