Trump's Budget Would Gut Office That Investigates Civil Rights Violations in Schools

Welcome to WHAT NOW, a morning round-up of the news/fresh horrors that await you today.

The civil rights division tasked with investigating discrimination in schools across the nation would be targeted with major cuts in President Trump’s budget, The Washington Post reported late Sunday.

Under the White House’s proposed 2018 budget, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, which has probed thousands of discrimination cases in schools and helped rewrite the rules on how schools across the country should respond to sexual assault, would see significant staffing cuts.

Trump’s administration also plans to disband the Department of Labor division that has policed discrimination among federal contractors for four decades under the White House’s proposed budget, according to the Post.

Administration officials acknowledged in budget documents that these cuts would mean scaling back the number of civil rights investigations the office conducts. The documents also said the division’s capacity “to achieve greater coordination and communication regarding core activities will be greatly diminished” under the cuts.

Vanita Gupta, who ran the Justice Department’s civil rights division for more than two years, said “there’s little question that it’s a rollback of civil rights across the board,” under the Trump administration.

WHAT ELSE?

• The Trump White House actually is petty as hell, according to reporting from The Washington Post, and it goes all the way to the very top.
• Mike Dubke, the White House communications director, is resigning after just three months on the job, Axios first reported. His departure is part of a broader wave of restructuring that includes Press Secretary Sean Spicer doing fewer on-camera briefings and, perhaps, Trump taking more questions from the press himself.
• A local Republican official in Portland told The Guardian he’s considering bringing in militia groups like the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters as security after two men were brutally murdered over the weekend while trying to intervene as a suspect harassed two women, one of whom was wearing a hijab, on public transit.

WHAT’S NEXT?

• Trump has said he will decide this week if the U.S. will pull of the the Paris climate accords, which would make the country the first of 195 signatories to do so.