“Updated Every Tuesday”: How the Office for Civil Rights Lost Count of Its Own Complaints

Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

Washington told Congress it cleared a massive backlog. The government’s own watchdog says the pile nearly doubled — and New Hampshire’s education department still points families to a federal regional office that closed in March 2025.

Open the federal government’s official list of school civil rights investigations today and two lines sit side by side at the top. One says “Updated every Tuesday.” The other gives the date of the last update: April 23, 2024. Granite State Report pulled the page on August 20, 2026. The promise and the timestamp have been contradicting each other, in public, on a government website, for more than two years.

That page is not a trivia item. It is the public window into the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, the agency a New Hampshire parent is supposed to call when a school ignores a disabled child’s accommodations or shrugs off racial harassment. The window is painted over. Behind it, the office spent 2025 firing half its staff, paying those same people tens of millions of dollars not to work, dismissing roughly nine of every ten complaints it resolved, and telling Congress the backlog was gone while its own numbers showed the opposite.

This is the story of a complaint system that quit keeping an honest count. The numbers conflict because the people running the system wanted it dismantled, and broken gauges are useful when you are arguing the machine no longer works.

Pick a number, any number

Start with the simplest question a functioning agency should answer: how many open cases do you have? The last honest public answer came on January 14, 2025, the final update to the pending-cases list. It showed 12,079 open investigations: 5,823 involving disability, 3,821 involving race, 2,852 involving sex. Then the list went dark.

After that, every count depends on who leaked what. The Associated Press, working from department data, put the backlog around 20,000 when President Trump took office and above 25,000 by December 2025. A fired attorney told NPR the office held about 25,000 pending complaints that month, of which only about 7,000 were formally open investigations. ProPublica, which has sued the department for records, counted roughly 12,000 open matters at the end of the Biden administration and nearly 24,000 by December.

Those figures do not reconcile, and the department has declined to reconcile them. Part of the gap is definitional: a “pending complaint” sitting in intake is not the same as an “open investigation,” and officials switch between the terms depending on which sounds better that day. The larger part is a transparency blackout. Senators wrote the department in March 2026 noting that it had neither refreshed the public case database since January 2025 nor released the office’s fiscal 2025 annual report to Congress, a report they say federal law requires. When an enforcement agency’s caseload can only be established by subpoena, lawsuit, or leak, the public has lost more than a data point.

What the office did instead of counting

On March 11, 2025, the department announced a reduction in force and shut seven of OCR’s twelve regional offices: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, and San Francisco. Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City, Seattle, and Washington headquarters remained. In the shuttered offices, staff could still receive email. They were barred from answering it.

Courts intervened within days. A federal judge in Massachusetts ordered fired department employees reinstated in May 2025. Rather than put its civil rights lawyers back to work, the department parked them. The Government Accountability Office found that 247 OCR employees sat on paid administrative leave from March 21 through mid-December 2025, forbidden to work, at a cost to taxpayers of $28.5 million to $38 million. That is nearly a quarter of the office’s roughly $140 million annual budget, spent on enforced idleness.

The complaints kept coming anyway. GAO’s report, GAO-26-108320, documents 9,269 new discrimination complaints between March 11 and September 23, 2025. The skeleton crew “resolved” 7,072 of them, and about 90 percent of those resolutions were dismissals, complaints closed without investigation. For scale: the dismissal rate was 49 percent in 2010–11 and 81 percent in 2019–20. Staff who remained described the operation to ProPublica as a “dismissal factory.” Even at that pace, GAO found the caseload still grew by an average of 98 cases per week through late summer. GAO’s bottom line on the whole exercise: the department “lacks reasonable assurance” that any of it saved money or improved service.

Then came the reversal. In October 2025, during the government shutdown, the department issued termination notices to 137 more OCR employees; senators calculated the combined firings would have eliminated 90 percent of the office. Courts and the November funding deal blocked that. On December 5, the department ordered the sidelined staff back to their desks, explaining that it “will utilize all employees currently being compensated by American taxpayers.” In early January 2026 it rescinded the OCR layoffs outright. By April, Secretary Linda McMahon was telling Senate appropriators the office was hiring additional attorneys, conceding that “we were not processing cases as quickly as we should.” Fire half the staff, pay them $38 million to sit, recall them, cancel the firing, then recruit. That is the efficiency program.

The claim to Congress

Here is where conflicting numbers stop being sloppy and start looking like something else. On May 2, 2025, the White House budget office sent Congress its fiscal 2026 request. It proposed cutting OCR’s budget by $49 million and justified the cut in part on the ground that the department had “clear[ed] through a massive backlog in 2025.”

Nobody outside the building had seen any such clearance. Rep. Bobby Scott, the House education committee’s ranking member, fired back a letter on May 8 pointing out that the office’s own public docket, the one promising weekly updates, still showed 12,079 open cases frozen in mid-January. He demanded weekly case counts, the mechanics of the supposed clearance, and an answer to a question that says everything about how little Congress trusted the process: “Were any artificial intelligence tools used to facilitate the clearing of the massive backlog?”

The record since then has answered him. The backlog was not cleared; by every independent count it grew. What the department called clearance, GAO’s data describes as mass dismissal. A report from Sen. Bernie Sanders’ office in April 2026 found OCR signed just 112 resolution agreements in all of 2025, about one percent of pending cases and the lowest rate in over a decade, with zero standard-process resolutions in the antisemitism and national-origin cases the administration claims as its signature priority. Students suing the department put it plainly in a complaint filed in March 2025: “no complainant has a fair shot at accessing an OCR investigation.”

Two lists, one Tuesday

The transparency blackout has a revealing exception. OCR keeps a second public list, a curated roster of open Title VI “shared ancestry” investigations, the antisemitism cases the administration promotes. While the master docket sat frozen at January 2025, that priority list kept receiving updates through December 23, 2025. Same agency, same website, same “Updated every Tuesday” banner. The list that flatters the administration’s enforcement story got maintained for eleven extra months. The list that would expose the backlog did not.

Even the favored list went stale after December 23, 2025, and it carries its own tell about the care being applied: it identifies one respondent as “Bernard College.” The institution under federal investigation is Barnard College. When an agency cannot spell the name of a school it is investigating on its own public docket, the docket is decoration.

Stranger still, the master pending-cases page displayed on August 20, 2026 a last-updated date of April 23, 2024, months earlier than the January 14, 2025 date Congress documented on the same page last year. Whether the site regressed to older content or is serving a broken fallback, the effect is identical: the page tells the public it refreshes weekly while displaying data more than two years old. The department’s broader statistics have followed the same trajectory. Its flagship Civil Rights Data Collection, due in December 2025, was still unpublished six months later, with officials promising it “later this summer.”

The New Hampshire dead end

Every one of New Hampshire’s school civil rights complaints used to run through OCR’s Boston office at 5 Post Office Square, which covered all six New England states. Boston was among the seven offices closed in March 2025. A Boston Globe review of department data found roughly 600 open New England investigations at the time of the transition, some dating to 2007, all of them handed to distant offices already carrying record caseloads.

Seventeen months later, the State of New Hampshire has not caught up with that fact. As of August 20, 2026, the New Hampshire Department of Education’s civil rights page still lists the shuttered Boston office, its dead phone line, and the OCR.Boston@ed.gov address as the “OCR office for New Hampshire.” A Granite State family following the state’s official guidance today is mailing its discrimination complaint to an office that no longer exists. The department could fix the page in an afternoon. As of September 22, 2026, the page still listed the Boston office.

The federal blackout reaches directly into this state. In March 2026 the department announced, by press release, a Title IX investigation into the Contoocook Valley School District in Peterborough. A ConVal parent looking for that case on the official pending-investigations list will not find it. The list froze before the case existed.

Where do those complaints belong now? The answer changed again in June. On June 16, 2026, the department announced it is handing the evaluation, investigation, and resolution of civil rights complaints to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, one of fourteen interagency agreements offloading Education Department functions. The department’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal would cut OCR to $91 million, 35 percent below fiscal 2025, and shrink staffing from 530 full-time equivalents to 271, roughly the level the courts just stopped it from reaching by firing. The online complaint portal at ocrcas.ed.gov remains live and legally your federal filing route; a New Hampshire family can also raise school discrimination with the New Hampshire Commission for Human Rights or the Attorney General’s Civil Rights Unit, which enforce state anti-discrimination law on their own track.

Incompetence would be the generous reading

So is this incompetence? The $38 million paid for enforced idleness argues yes. So does the hire-fire-rehire whiplash, and so does a federal docket that misspells its own respondents. But incompetence does not explain the pattern. Incompetence freezes both lists; here, the politically useful list stayed current for eleven months while the incriminating one went dark. Incompetence garbles numbers at random; here, the only confident number the administration produced, a cleared backlog, ran in exactly the direction that justified a $49 million cut, and every independent audit ran the other way. This administration stated its goal in writing: dismantle the department. The frozen page, the missing annual report, the late data, and the conflicting counts are not failures of that project. They are its instruments. You cannot hold an office accountable for a backlog it will not count, and you cannot defend an office whose collapse has been made invisible.

In my judgment, that is the story: a demolition, carried out at premium prices, with the gauges disconnected so the public could not watch. New Hampshire families were never consulted. They were simply left holding a state webpage that points to a locked door in Boston, a federal webpage that promises Tuesday and delivers 2024, and a constitutional guarantee that is only as real as the office built to enforce it.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Sources: OCR, Pending Cases Currently Under Investigation (retrieved Aug. 20, 2026) · OCR, List of Open Title VI Shared Ancestry Investigations (retrieved Aug. 20, 2026) · GAO-26-108320, Department of Education: Full Costs and Savings Estimate Needed for Reduction-in-Force and Restructuring of the Office for Civil Rights (Jan. 29, 2026) · Rep. Robert C. Scott, letter to Secretary McMahon (May 8, 2025) · Letter of 15 U.S. senators to McMahon and Richey (Mar. 20, 2026) · Senate HELP Committee minority release on GAO report (Feb. 2, 2026) · NH Department of Education, Civil Rights (retrieved Aug. 20, 2026) · NPR (Dec. 10, 2025) · AP via Federal News Network (Dec. 8, 2025) · Axios on July 2025 court filing · K-12 Dive (Mar. 12, 2025) · K-12 Dive on the Sanders report (May 2026) · Higher Ed Dive (Jun. 16, 2026) · ProPublica (Mar. 2026) · GBH News (Dec. 4, 2025) · The 19th (Feb. 6, 2026) · Human Rights Watch, Remedies Abandoned (Aug. 13, 2026) · U.S. Dept. of Education press release on Contoocook Valley investigation (Mar. 2026) · Boston Globe (May 13, 2025). Related GSR coverage: HB 1586 Punishes Disabled Children for the State’s Own Failures · New Hampshire’s Senate Bill 626: A Threat to Public Access.

Editor’s note: The three agency pages are cited as they appeared on August 20, 2026. The pending-cases page displayed an April 23, 2024 date to GSR, while Rep. Scott’s May 2025 letter documented a January 14, 2025 date on the same page; both observations show a page claiming weekly updates while serving data over a year old, and the discrepancy between them is noted in the body. The OMB “massive backlog” quotation is reproduced from Rep. Scott’s letter, which cites the OMB document. Backlog totals attributed to AP, NPR, and ProPublica conflict, and this article reports that conflict rather than adopting one figure. Neither NH DOE nor the U.S. Department of Education was contacted for comment before publication; this article rests on the departments’ own public pages and public records, quoted and linked directly, and any response from either will be added under GSR’s corrections policy. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a dated note identifying what changed and when. The corrections policy and the corrections register are public, and correction notes are never removed. Reach the editor at granitestatereport@gmail.com. This article reports on government conduct; nothing in it is legal advice.