The US Department of Agriculture announced on Wednesday that it has frozen federal funds to Maine over the state’s refusal to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order barring biological males from female sports.
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins sent a letter to Maine Governor Janet Mills announcing the pause, writing, "You cannot openly violate federal law against discrimination in education and expect federal funding to continue unabated. Your defiance of federal law has cost your state, which is bound by Title IX in educational programming."
Rollins said that funding for certain administrative and technological functions in schools was affected by the freeze. "This pause does not impact federal feeding programs or direct assistance to Mainers; if a child was fed today, they will be fed tomorrow," she noted.
Rollins told Mills that the freeze announced Wednesday was "only the beginning, though you are free to end it at any time by protecting women and girls in compliance with federal law."
In addition to the funding freeze, Rollins said that the department is reviewing "all research and education-related funding in Maine for compliance with the Constitution, federal laws including Titles VI and IX, and the priorities of the Trump Administration," and said that the USDA has undertaken a review of all grants given out by the Biden Administration to the Maine Department of Education.
"Many of these grants appear to be wasteful, redundant, or otherwise against the priorities of the Trump Administration. USDA will not extend the Biden Administration's bloated bureaucracy and will instead focus on a Department that is farmer-first and without a leftist social agenda," Rollins wrote.
Rollins said that in order to continue receiving funding from the USA, the state must demonstrate compliance with Title IX’s "protection of female student athletes from having to compete with or against or having to appear unclothed before males."
