The omnibus spending package passed by Congress last week will give a serious boost to the Department of Education’s civil rights enforcement arm^ even as that office narrows the scope of its investigative work.
The legislation provides a total of $117 million for the Office for Civil Rights for fiscal year 2018. That’s about $8.5 million more than the office’s funding levels for the previous year. And it makes the third straight budget cycle in which the office has seen Congress increase its funding -- despite proposals from the Trump administration to cut support for the office.
OCR^ however^ has taken steps recently to streamline its investigation of civil rights complaints^ limiting its use of broad systemic reviews and mandating that cases be automatically dismissed under a range of circumstances. Those and other changes^ department leaders have argued^ are necessary to clear a substantial backlog of open investigations that has persisted since the Obama administration.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/03/30/more-money-civil-rights-office-comes-it-narrows-its-investigative-work