President Biden drops unfinished protections for trans athletes

ByABC News
December 21, 2024, 11:09 AM

President Joe Biden is abandoning his efforts to provide some protections for transgender student-athletes and cancel student loans for more than 38 million Americans, the first steps in an administration-wide plan to jettison pending regulations to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from retooling them to achieve his own aims.

The White House expects to pull back unfinished rules across several agencies if there isn’t enough time to finalize them before Trump takes office. If the proposed regulations were left in their current state, the next administration would be able to rewrite them and advance its agenda more quickly.

As the pending Biden regulations are withdrawn, nothing prevents Trump from pursuing his own regulations on the same issues when he returns to the White House, but he would have to start from scratch in a process that can take months or even years.

For the regulation on transgender students, the Education Department said it was withdrawing the proposal because of ongoing litigation over how Title IX, the landmark law preventing sex discrimination, should handle issues of gender identity. In addition, the department said there were 150,000 public comments with a range of feedback, including suggestions for modifications that needed to be considered.

At this point, the department wrote, “We do not intend for a final rule to be issued.”

Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump, accused the White House of “adding more red tape and making it more difficult for him to govern.”

Kate Shaw, who served in the White House counsel’s office under President Barack Obama, said it’s not unusual for administrations to speed up or slow down rulemaking. It’s more typical, she said, for the federal government to race to finalize regulations during a transition period, but that can be difficult when there’s a time crunch.

“If you haven’t started it early enough, you’re not going to be able to wrap it up,” she said.

Biden’s rule on transgender sports was proposed in 2023 but was delayed multiple times. It was supposed to be a follow-up to his broader rule that extended civil rights protections to LGBTQ+ students under Title IX.

The sports rule would have prevented schools from banning transgender athletes outright while allowing limits for certain reasons — for example, if it was a matter of “fairness” in competition or to reduce injury risks.

Biden’s proposal left both sides of the issue asking for more. Advocates said it didn’t go far enough in protecting transgender students from school policies that could unfairly exclude them. Opponents said it fell short of protecting girls and ensuring fairness.

In April, a bill passed the House of Representatives by party-line vote that would have barred transgender athletes whose sex assigned at birth was male from competing on girls’ or women’s sports teams at federally supported schools and colleges. The legislation, pushed through by House Republicans, never advanced further in the currently Democratic-led Senate, and Biden had said he would veto it.

Biden’s regulation sat on the back burner through the presidential campaign as the issue became a subject of Republican outrage. Trump campaigned on a promise to ban transgender athletes, with a promise to “keep men out of women’s sports.”

Had Biden’s proposal been finalized, it was certain to face legal challenges from conservatives who said Biden overstepped his authority. Biden’s broader policy on Title IX, which was finalized in April, faced a barrage of legal challenges that prevented it from taking effect in 26 states.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.