April 7, 2025 – Last week, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced she was pausing some USDA funding that flows to the Maine Department of Education based on violations of Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination based on sex.
The news came after a series of executive orders signed by President Trump that define sex and gender so that schools that allow transgender female athletes to participate in women’s sports are in violation of Title IX. “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 a letter. The National Collegiate Athletic Association estimates less than a tenth of 1 percent of college athletes are transgender.
In response, Maine today filed a lawsuit against the USDA. “Under the banner of keeping children safe, the Trump Administration is illegally withholding grant funds that go to keeping children fed,” Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said in a statement. “This is just another example where no law or consequence appears to restrain the administration as it seeks capitulation to its lawlessness. The President and his Cabinet secretaries do not make the law and they are not above the law, and this action is necessary to remind the President that Maine will not be bullied into violating the law.”
In the statement, Frey said that the Child Nutrition Program of the Maine Department of Education was “unable to access several sources of federal funding, all of which are necessary to feed children and vulnerable adults.” That’s despite the fact that Rollins, in her letter, said school meals would not be affected but that funding for “certain administrative and technological functions in schools” would be withheld. “This is only the beginning,” she said, “though you are free to end it at any time by protecting women and girls in compliance with federal law.”
The USDA did not respond to a question from Civil Eats asking for details on what other kind of funding the agency, which oversees food and agriculture, would withhold from a state education department.
