April 2 (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Wednesday paused federal funds for certain Maine educational programs in response to the state’s opposition to banning transgender females from competing in women’s sports in Maine.
The amount of funding wasn’t disclosed.
Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins’ letter dated April 2 to Maine Gov. Janet Mills described the pause, as well as an ongoing review of federal funding that the state receives from the agency.
The letter said USDA will terminate certain nonessential funding in Maine if Title IX violations “are not resolved to the satisfaction of the Federal Government.”
This comes after Maine’s continual refusal to provide equal opportunity to women and girls in educational programs, in direct violation of Title IX, according to the Trump administration. Title IX, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, was enacted in 1972.
“In order to continue to receive taxpayer dollars from USDA, the state of Maine must demonstrate compliance with Title IX which protects female student athletes from having to compete with or against or having to appear unclothed before males,” Rollins wrote in the letter.
“In addition, USDA has launched a full review of grants awarded by the Biden administration to the Maine Department of Education,” Rollins wrote. “Many of these grants appear to be wasteful, redundant, or otherwise against the priorities of the Trump Administration. USDA will not stand for the Biden Administration’s bloated bureaucracy and will instead focus on a Department that is farmer-first and without a leftist social agenda.”
The funding won’t affect federal feeding programs or direct assistance to citizens.
“If a child was fed today, they will be fed tomorrow,” the letter said.
President Donald Trump followed through on his campaign promise to sign an order though a relatively small number of transgender people compete in sports.
On Feb. 5, Trump signed an executive order called Keeping Men out of Women’s Sports.
The order is intended to reverse the policy of the Biden administration, which considered banning transgender athletes a violation of Title IX federal law. The law prohibits sex discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal funds.
At a meeting of governors at the White House on Feb. 21, Trump singled out Maine’s leader for not conforming to the executive order.
“We’re going to follow the law, sir. We’ll see you in court,” Mills said to the president, referencing the Maine Human Rights Act. This law, amended four years prior, includes gender identity as a protected class.
On March 22, Trump on Truth Social demanded an “full throated apology” from Mills.
She refused to apologize, telling reporters: “I read the Constitution. The Constitution says that the president, the chief executive, shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. It doesn’t allow him to make laws out of whole cloth by tweet or Instagram post by press release or executive order. That’s just fundamental law, and I stand by the rule of law and separation of powers.”
In 2023, the U.S. House approved a bill that proposed an amendment to Title IX, restricting transgender athletes from competing in girls and women’s sports at federally funded educational institutions. But it didn’t pass in the Senate, which requires 60 votes.
About 1.3 million adults and 300,000 youth ages 13 to 17 identify as transgender out of 330 million people, according to a report published by Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA’s Law School in 2022.
Trans people appear to have no advantage in sports, according to an October 2023 review of 2017 research published in the journal Sports Medicine.
Fewer than 40 of the NCAA’s more than 500,000 athletes are known to be transgender, Anna Baeth, director of research at Athlete Ally, an organization that advocates for LGBTQ equality in sports.
Transgender athletes are allowed to compete in the Olympics if they meet the eligibility criteria set by their sport’s International Federation.
The NCAA’s Board of Governors after the executive order revised the association’s sports participation policies to ban biological males from completing in NCAA-sanctioned women’s college sports.
USDA said it supports the recent actions of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in enforcing Title IX.
On March 17, HHS announced the Maine Department of Education, the Maine Principals’ Association and Greely High School are each in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and its HHS implementing regulation.
“The Maine Department of Education may not shirk its obligations under Federal law by ceding control of its extracurricular activities, programs, and services to the Maine Principals’ Association,” Anthony Archeval, acting director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS, said.
On March 19 Trump administration withheld $175 million to the University of Pennsylvania because is allows biological males to compete in women’s sports.,
