Experts say that silence might mean MSU is, in effect, off the hook after years of close monitoring, but the university says it's not necessarily an unusual gap.

Former employees of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, or OCR, contacted by The State News noted that large lapses in communication from the federal government aren’t unusual, particularly when the investigations take longer than expected. McCann also said it's "not atypical" for there to be long gaps in communication.

Still, they said, the department’s silence on 22 separate inquiries could be a sign that some, if not all, of its investigations have been paused while the administration figures out how it wants to address certain civil rights violations, or due to staffing shortages.

"We’re seeing a lot of cases lying fallow, nothing happening with them, and it’s really just a small subset of high-profile cases that are actually moving forward," said Jackie Gharapour Wernz, who was an OCR attorney during President Donald Trump’s first administration and under President Barack Obama.

Beth Gellman-Beer, who directed the Education Department’s Philadelphia office before being laid off in March, said in an email to The State News that preexisting staffing and resource issues are "now aggravated with significantly less staff."

Wernz said she believes most universities are mistakenly breathing a sigh of relief at the potentially paused investigations, even if it could lead to problems down the road as students seek other avenues, like lawsuits against their school to pursue complaints. 

"Just like with anything else, when you see a decrease in regulation, you see a decrease in accountability," she said.

The State News reached out to the Department of Education's main press contact and received no reply. A voicemail greeting stated that the office is "temporarily closed."

The Department of Education has historically been charged with ensuring that schools and universities that receive federal funding don’t engage in sex, race or disability-based discrimination. Those investigations can be prompted by an individual request to the department, or be ordered by the federal government.

The agency can do things like fine universities, require them to update or review policies, or subject them to increased oversight if it discovers wrongdoing in either variety of investigation. The department fined MSU $4.5 million in 2019 after investigating how the institution handled sexual assault complaints against Larry Nassar, and subjected the university to increased oversight.

The Trump administration’s cuts to the Department of Education, which included 264 employees in the OCR, have greatly diminished the department’s ability to pursue new investigations. Meanwhile, the administration has ordered what’s left of the department to focus on stamping out antisemitism, DEI and the presence of transgender student athletes, Politico reported in July.

Since Jan. 20, the department has reached agreements with universities in 26 cases, 17 of which revolved around complaints of sex-based discrimination. Most of the sexual discrimination cases sprang out of two types of complaints: A university had not published its procedure for addressing reports of sexual discrimination, or a male student argued that scholarships available only to female students were discriminatory.

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Trump administration can go through with mass layoffs across the department. That means the 264 laid-off OCR employees who had begun to return to work due to a lower-court order could now be fired once again.

The uncertainty around the Department of Education’s investigations into MSU encompasses one case The State News reported on in November. That story revealed MSU was being investigated by the federal agency for its handling of a sexual discrimination complaint filed by a student against an Olin Health Center practitioner. 

That probe put MSU in a particularly thorny position, once again defending itself amid sexual assault allegations against one of its healthcare providers.