House Democrats urged Education Secretary Linda McMahon not to make cuts to the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights as employees work through the backlog of cases, which includes scores of civil rights complaints from Jewish students alleging discrimination at their universities since the Oct.7, 2023, attacks on Israel. 

After Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) accused McMahon and the Trump administration of being broadly unconcerned with civil rights, citing the Office of Civil Rights and the Education Department “being decimated,” McMahon responded: “It isn’t being decimated. We have reduced the size of it; however, we are taking on a backlog of cases that were left over from the Biden administration.”

Asked why she’d reduce resources to the office given the backlog from the previous administration, McMahon replied, “Because we’re working more efficiently in the department.”

Rep. Lois Frankel (D-FL) similarly urged McMahon not to make cuts to OCR “if you are sincere about fighting antisemitism and also all kinds of unlawful discrimination.” Frankel also referenced several other programs she wanted McMahon to protect, a number of which McMahon expressed openness to considering. 

After recounting an experience of a Jewish friend who took their children out of the Washington, D.C., public school system due to its unwillingness to address concerns about antisemitism, Rep. Stephanie Bice (R-OK) offered McMahon an opportunity to speak about the rise of antisemitism in primary and secondary education. 

“Certainly the president has made it very clear that he does not condone any kind of discrimination — racial and especially, we’ve seen religious, we’ve seen it across our college campuses, some of the most elite in the country. We took very strong and very decisive action against those universities who clearly were not protecting Jewish students against antisemitism,” McMahon told the committee. 

“When you see students barricaded in a library, and others pounding on the glass going, ‘Death to Jews. Death to Israel. Death to United States,’ that is unacceptable at our college campuses. And we reacted,” she continued.

McMahon went on to discuss her engagement with Columbia University, praising its acting president, Claire Shipman, for her response to student protesters involved in the takeover of the school’s main library earlier this month.

“We reacted to Columbia first. This incident happened at Columbia, and I met with the president of Columbia. I’ve had two conversations now with the current president of Columbia. We’ve talked about things that we need to do at those universities. We want to be able to be supportive, but those universities, albeit they’re private, do receive federal funding. We have leverage to withhold some of that federal funding or to cancel some of the grants, and we would do that unless it could be proven that these colleges and universities are going to respect all rights and set their policy in place and enforce them,” McMahon said.

“I was complimentary to the acting president now at Columbia, Claire Shipman, when I talked to her last week, and I said, ‘You reacted just as you said you would to the recent uprising on campus. You were looking at whether or not– you’ve suspended students, are you going to expel them?’ And that’s still what she’s looking at. So we’ve seen that that kind of action can deliver results,” she continued.