Trump Moves to Strip Tax Exemption From Schools That Aid Minority Students

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 Summary

“Treasury rules would revoke tax-exempt status from schools with race-based programs, citing fundamental public policy. The I.R.S. would apply this standard after May 31, affecting up to 18,000 institutions.

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The Treasury Department released rules that would prevent schools with race-based programs from qualifying for tax-exempt status, a threat to both higher education and other private schools.

Sept. 3, 2026Updated 11:12 a.m. ET

Schools like Harvard could be at risk of losing their tax-exempt status under the new rules.Sophie Park for The New York Times

The Trump administration released new rules that could revoke tax-exempt status from any school offering targeted support to Black or other minority students, a sweeping change that opens another front in the president’s campaign to reshape American education.

The proposed regulations, which the Treasury Department published on Thursday, would add another element to the guidelines schools and other organizations must follow to qualify for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service. The rules would deny tax-exempt status to any school, including secondary schools and universities, if it has any policy or program, including admissions and scholarships, that the I.R.S. finds to be racially discriminatory.

Such a change would thrust the I.R.S. into the center of the Trump administration’s push to pressure schools to abandon initiatives aimed at supporting Black and other minority students, efforts meant to address the nation’s long history of racial discrimination and segregation. Trump officials, however, view such programs as a form of discrimination against white and Asian Americans, and federal civil rights lawyers have opened investigations on those grounds into admissions policies at Harvard, Yale and other schools.

The threat of losing tax-exempt status would tighten the financial squeeze the administration has applied to higher education by withholding federal research funding. Last year, President Trump called for the I.R.S. to strip Harvard of its tax-exempt status, which experts said would be contrary to a federal law prohibiting the I.R.S. from carrying out politically directed audits.

While schools may still not owe much in federal income taxes even if they lost their tax-exempt status, the exemption is valuable because it allows donors to deduct donations they make directly to the school, helping fund-raising efforts. The rules will take effect after May 31 and apply to as many as 18,000 schools, the Treasury said.

The rule is likely to face a legal challenge from the American Association of University Professors, one senior official said. The A.A.U.P., which advocates academic freedom, tenure protections and shared campus governance, led a successful lawsuit against the Trump administration last year that challenged research funding cuts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Weaponizing the I.R.S. to attack colleges and universities that uphold and expand civil rights is outrageous,” said Todd Wolfson, president of A.A.U.P. “This is blatantly racist political coercion intended to deny minority students reparative opportunities to further their education.”

Beyond education, the Trump administration has more broadly sought to push the I.R.S. to be more aggressive in investigating left-leaning nonprofits, including those that Trump officials accuse of supporting terrorism. I.R.S. officials have in recent weeks discussed creating a faster process for revoking tax-exempt status from nonprofits, according to people familiar with the conversations.

“Schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement. “Today’s Treasury and I.R.S. proposed regulations establish a clear standard, and the institutions that continue to use discriminatory practices will no longer receive the benefits of federal tax-exempt status.”

The Trump administration said the tax regulations would draw on a 1983 Supreme Court case that found an organization could not receive tax-exempt status if it was in opposition to a “fundamental public policy.” In that case, the I.R.S. revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, a conservative Christian school, because the school had a policy banning interracial relationships. The Supreme Court upheld the I.R.S. decision because “racial discrimination in education violates a fundamental public policy.”

But what counts as a fundamental public policy has otherwise been left largely undefined, and the standard has been rarely used to deny a group’s tax exemption. The Trump administration first said last year that it would develop guidelines on the application of the fundamental public policy concept. In June, the Treasury Department submitted regulations on the topic to a White House regulatory office, which approved them last month.

Based on how the Trump administration had described its plans for the regulations, nonprofit experts had expected they will state that giving a preference to Black or other minority applicants in admissions runs counter to fundamental public policy. The administration said it would rely on a 2023 Supreme Court ruling, in the Students for Fair Admissions case, to set a standard for what counts as a fundamental public policy.

In the majority opinion in that case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. declared that any applicant “must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual — not on the basis of race.” He also said, though, that the court’s opinion should not be “construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”

University officials have said that the ruling allows schools to consider race as part of a broader review of an applicant’s character. But the Trump administration has adopted a narrow view of the ruling, dismissing holistic reviews of applicants as workarounds for universities to pursue diversity goals.

“They will state that what we used to call affirmative action is now a violation of fundamental public policy,” said Darryll K. Jones, a law professor at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. “They have announced that they are going to use the new regulations to implement Students for Fair Admissions as far and as wide as possible.”

But Phil Hackney, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, was skeptical of whether courts would agree with how the Trump administration defines a fundamental public policy.

“Fundamental public policy is not something that the I.R.S. can just go and grab; it needs to be something that is deeply anchored,” he said. “Clearly, we are quite divided on this issue right now, there is nowhere close to overwhelming agreement.”

The proposed regulations themselves do not provide much detail into how the I.R.S. might evaluate what policies or school activities it considers to be racially discriminatory. The Treasury said the final rules “would further define race-based action for the purpose of ameliorating societal discrimination as a form of discrimination” and delete previous I.R.S. guidance allowing schools to favor minorities in admissions, programs and financial assistance as part of an effort to create a more equitable campus.

The Treasury also said that programs targeting at students from specific geographic areas or socioeconomic backgrounds could continue, an alternative way that, the department said, donors and schools could, in effect, still support minority students.

The Treasury’s proposed regulations will be subject to a potentially lengthy public comment period that could result in changes. Once the rules are finalized, their enforcement is likely to involve I.R.S. audits of the schools and universities to determine whether they were impermissibly considering race.

Such audits could go on for months and give a university the opportunity to challenge any revocation of tax-exempt status in court, where a judge could strike down the Treasury’s regulations.”

 

Tiger Woods handed five-year driving ban after no-contest plea over crash

Guardian sport

In this image from police body camera video, Tiger Woods performs a field sobriety test following a car crash on Jupiter Island, Florida, on 27 March 2026. Photograph: Martin County Sheriff's Office/AP

“Tiger Woods pleaded no contest to reckless driving on Wednesday morning as part of an agreement with Florida prosecutors that reduced a DUI charge stemming from his rollover crash in March.

The 50-year-old was adjudicated guilty of willful and wanton reckless driving, a second offense, during a hearing in Martin County court. Under the agreement, Woods was fined $1,000 and had his driver’s license suspended for five years. Prosecutors had originally charged him with driving under the influence with property damage.

Woods also pleaded no contest to refusing to submit to a lawful test and was fined $500 on that count. He received a concurrent five-year license suspension on a careless-driving citation and agreed not to seek a hardship exemption during the suspension. Court records show he paid $2,131.44 in fines and costs following Wednesday’s hearing.

The plea agreement brings an end to the criminal case arising from the golfer’s crash near his Florida home on Jupiter Island. He had previously pleaded not guilty to both charges.

Woods, dressed in ⁠a dark suit and tie, arrived at the Martin County Courthouse seated in the front passenger seat of a black SUV. He did not answer questions ‌from the gathered reporters as ‌he and his girlfriend, Vanessa Trump, walked in and out of the building for the change of plea hearing.

The charges stemmed from a 27 March crash in Hobe Sound. Martin County sheriff John Budensiek said Woods was driving a Land Rover that overturned after he attempted to overtake a truck on a narrow two-lane road shortly before 2pm.

The truck had been slowing to turn into a driveway when Woods approached at what Budensiek described as a “high rate of speed” on a road with a 30mph limit. Woods’s vehicle clipped a trailer, veered off and came to rest on its driver’s side after sliding along the roadway.

Woods, who was alone in the vehicle, was able to exit through the passenger side and was not injured. Investigators said he showed signs of impairment and subjected him to roadside tests before taking him into custody.

A breath test showed no alcohol in his system, but Woods refused to provide a urine sample for drug testing. He told investigators he had taken several medications earlier that day, including drugs for high blood pressure and cholesterol as well as ibuprofen and the prescription painkiller Vicodin, according to court filings released by prosecutors.

The filings also detailed a series of unusual remarks Woods made to officers at the scene. About an hour after the crash, he spoke of “10 to 15 drones” equipped with GoPro cameras flying over his home and car. At another point, after stepping away while on the phone, Woods told an officer he had “just [been] talking to the president” before trailing off. The documents did not identify which president he meant, although Donald Trump said later that day that he had spoken with Woods following the crash.

Woods also told officers he had been looking down at his phone to change the radio station when the collision occurred.

Bodycam footage shows moment Tiger Woods is arrested for DUI – video

Prosecutors later sought access to Woods’s prescription records from the months leading up to the crash. His attorneys objected, arguing that the records were private, and asked a judge to determine whether they were relevant to the case and to restrict their disclosure.

Days after his arrest, Woods announced that he would step away from golf “to seek treatment and focus on my health”. A judge subsequently granted him permission to travel abroad to enter an inpatient treatment facility, which his attorney said was necessary for an intensive, individualized program.

The crash marked another high-profile traffic incident for Woods. In February 2021, he was seriously injured when his SUV veered off a road in Los Angeles at high speed, leaving him with leg and ankle injuries so severe that doctors considered amputation.

He was also arrested on a DUI charge in south Florida in 2017 after police found him asleep behind the wheel of a damaged vehicle. Woods later said he had taken a problematic combination of prescription medications and pleaded guilty to reckless driving.

Another incident took place in 2009, when Woods crashed his SUV into a fire hydrant and a tree outside his home in Windermere, Florida.

Woods has played a limited schedule in recent years amid chronic pain, injuries and multiple surgeries, including a seventh back procedure and a ruptured achilles tendon. He has not competed in an official PGA Tour event since July 2024.

An 82-time winner on the PGA Tour, Woods is tied with Sam Snead for the most victories in tour history. The 15-time major champion last won one at the 2019 Masters, his fifth title at Augusta National.“

 

This data has helped fight workplace discrimination for 60 years. The Trump administration plans to delete it

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 Summary

“The EEOC proposes ending EEO-1 demographic data collection, a tool used since 1964 to enforce anti-discrimination laws. Experts warn this shift under the Trump administration hinders identifying bias and aligns the agency with political goals.

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Enforcing civil rights without these reports will be difficult for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, pushing US agency closer to Trump’s agenda, experts warn

The move represents a fundamental shift for the EEOC. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images

The US civil rights agency mandated to protect equal rights for workers is set to stop collecting data on the demographic makeup of companies – which for the past six decades has been used to enforce anti-discrimination laws.

The move marks a fundamental shift for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Without this data, it will be much harder for the agency to identify widespread cases of discrimination in hiring and promotions, experts and former employees of the commission say. And, they warn, it will bring the Trump administration one step closer to reshaping the commission from an independent watchdog into an arm of the executive branch narrowly focused on advancing the political grievances of Donald Trump’s base.

Over the summer, the EEOC proposed terminating its EEO-1 reports, which require companies to submit information on employees, broken down by race, ethnicity, sex and job title. The proposal comes amid the Trump administration’s aggressive attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and its consistent work to terminate or alter decades’ worth of federal datasets because they conflict with its political goals. The majority-Republican commission is expected to approve the measure sometime in the fall.

“Getting rid of this data collection is part of a larger effort to weaponize civil rights enforcement and flip the laws that we have on their head,” said Katie Sandson, senior counsel on the education and workplace justice team at the National Women’s Law Center, which is suing the EEOC for refusing to enforce workplace protections for trans employees.

The EEO-1 is the only data collection of its kind, providing insights into trends such as the percentage of women in senior level executive positions in US companies and the racial makeup of a company’s lowest-paid staff. With this data, the EEOC, since its creation under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, has investigated thousands of employee complaints every year and helped recover billions of dollars for employees who faced discrimination and harassment.

But since Trump took office again in January 2025, the EEOC has completely rewritten its strategic goals, and is now prioritizing discrimination claims made by white men, dropping cases on behalf of transgender workers, investigating workplace diversity practices, and rescinding anti-harassment guidance.

At a July hearing, Andrea Lucas, the EEOC commissioner who was appointed by Trump, claimed the agency’s demographic data collection is unconstitutional, burdensome on employers, encourages DEI programs, and incentivizes discrimination against white workers.

“I believe the Commission’s proposed rescission of the annual reporting requirement will not hinder the Commission’s law enforcement work to investigate specific charges of discrimination,” Lucas said in a statement on the proposed end of the data collection. The EEOC did not respond to the Guardian’s specific questions about how the agency’s priorities have shifted under the second Trump administration.

‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’

The EEOC receives nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints every year. EEO-1 data is one of the first tools EEOC investigators use to determine what cases it should put its limited enforcement resources towards, a question that has become especially important at a time when the EEOC’s staffing levels are at its lowest point in 45 years.

“If you see a particular employer really stands out because they have fewer women in management or fewer Black people in management compared to their peer employers in the same industry or in the same area, it’s more likely the case that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and there’s something going on here,” said Karla Gilbride, a former general counsel at the EEOC who is now a deputy director of litigation for the Disability Rights program at the ACLU.

The EEO-1 data is also made public in the aggregate (meaning individual employers cannot be identified). For researchers and civil rights advocates, it has been an important source of data to evaluate the impact of diversity and workforce policies.

Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, a founding director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that he and other researchers have had data-sharing agreements with the EEOC since the late 1990s. Last summer, the EEOC abruptly terminated all data-sharing agreements with social scientists and stopped all communication with them, said Tomaskovic-Devey.

In cases when the EEOC can’t settle a complaint with the employer, they can take the employer to court, and EEO-1 data can also be used as supporting evidence in litigation.

One such lawsuit started with a complaint filed by Cassandra Coleman. In 2016, she applied for a trucking job at the Phoenix, Arizona, office of Central Transport, a large national trucking company. A male employee tried to discourage her from applying. “It’s not going to do you any good,” he said, according to the complaint. Despite having 21 years of experience and a spotless driving record, Coleman never got a call back from the company. Central Transport hired 10 male truck drivers around the same time.

Three years later, Coleman applied for another job at Central Transport, this time in Portland, Oregon. She was invited for an interview, but when she arrived at the company offices, she was told the position had been filled.

The EEOC found that Coleman wasn’t alone. Female applicants at more than 25 locations across the country alleged their applications to work at Central Transport had been thrown away, lost, or passed over for less-qualified male candidates, and together, their cases became part of a class-action lawsuitfiled by the EEOC.

In the lawsuit, the EEOC used the EEO-1 data to show there was a consistent statistical disparity between the number of female truck drivers hired and the number of female applicants, according to the complaint.

Combining the data findings with witness testimonies, the agency alleged that Central Transport repeatedly passed over qualified female applicants for more than 10 years and in multiple states. In May 2026, Central Transport agreed to pay $5.5m and enter a consent decree to make changes to its hiring process.

A broader attack on diversity, equity and inclusion

Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved quickly to make the rollback of DEI efforts an explicit government objective. Changes at the EEOC have been at the center of this transformation.

One of Trump’s first acts during his second term was to fire two of the threeDemocratic EEOC commissioners before the end of their five-year terms, an unprecedented move that laid the groundwork for Republicans to gain a 2-1 majority on the commission.

In addition to rescinding EEO-1 data collection, the EEOC has since rolled backguidelines protecting workers from national origin-based discrimination; deleted anti-harassment guidance because it included using the wrong pronouns as harassment, dropped all active cases pertaining to trans or nonbinary people; and announced its intent to revise the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act to exclude people who need accommodations for abortions and other pregnancy-related medical conditions.

Other efforts to root out “DEI-related discrimination” have targeted specific employers. The EEOC opened investigations into Nike’s corporate diversity practices, sent letters to 20 law firms requesting information about their DEI practices and sued the New York Times for allegedly discriminating against a white male employee who did not get promoted.

In December, Lucas, the EEOC commissioner, encouraged white men to file discrimination complaints to the EEOC in a post on X. In a video she asks: “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.”

For now, many of the top-down changes appear to have had minimal impact on the types of cases the EEOC is continuing to tackle. “The bulk of EEOC investigator time is still devoted to the ordinary charges they get about ongoing discrimination,” said Chai Feldblum, who was a commissioner from 2010-2019 and is now the president of the EEO Leaders, a watchdog group of former EEOC employees tracking the Trump administration’s actions at the agency.

But Feldblum is worried that agency staff are increasingly being pressured to prioritize certain cases based on the agency’s new strategic goals. EEOC staffers told Mother Jones last year that they were told to prioritize complaints from workers who allege they were discriminated against for being American-born and stop pursuing gender-identity discrimination cases.

In June, the EEOC withdrew its 10-year strategic enforcement plan and instituted a new national enforcement plan, which explicitly lays out a narrow set of new priorities for the agency: combating “DEI-related discrimination” and “anti-American national origin discrimination”, and protecting “workers’ rights to express the binary nature of sex” and “religious liberty rights”.

Getting rid of EEO-1 data is one way to carry out this plan.

“The data is not going to show that white people or men are disproportionately not represented in management positions, and so they have no interest in collecting that,” Feldblum said.

“It’s not a coincidence that the EEOC is trying to eliminate data collection that documents potential discrimination,” said Maya Raghu, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law’s director of the Protecting and Advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiative.

“It’s all part of a bigger pattern of this administration weaponizing our civil rights agencies, both to undermine civil rights protections and enforcement, but also to advance this anti-diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.”

The Guardian’s Deleted data series explores how critical US government information is being deleted and what the consequences will be, and will preserve or recreate lost datasets. If you know about any datasets, webpages or government materials that have been deleted or altered in the past year, or are willing to share how those changes affect you, we’d love to hear from you. Please reach out at deleted-data@theguardian.com.“

 

Whistle-Blower Says Trump Officials Are Defying Court Orders on Voting by Mail

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 Summary

“A whistle-blower alleges the U.S. Postal Service is rushing a digital system to implement Trump’s mail voting order despite Judge Talwani’s block. The report warns of potential catastrophic failure affecting millions of ballots.

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A report detailed “grave concerns” that a new system being rushed into use by the U.S. Postal Service could imperil millions of mail ballots ahead of the midterm elections.

Sept. 1, 2026, 6:00 a.m. ET

The office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, published the whistle-blower report on voting by mail.Kenny Holston/The New York Times

A U.S. Postal Service official has alleged that the agency is moving forward with a “secretive, rushed” effort to implement President Trump’s order exerting federal control over mail voting, despite a court order blocking those plans.

The official filed a whistle-blower report, published on Tuesday morning by the office of Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, asserting that the “risky and haphazard” implementation of Mr. Trump’s order could lead to a “catastrophic failure” in the mail ballot system ahead of this year’s midterm elections. The report said that the agency had planned to complete the new digital system overseeing mail ballots by Sept. 1.

“Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all,” the official said in the report, which was prepared with the assistance of Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit group that represents people seeking to expose potential lawbreaking.

Speaking to reporters by phone on Monday, Mr. Blumenthal said of the report that “the main takeaway for me is that the Postal Service has designed a system to disenfranchise millions of Americans. One-third of all Americans cast their ballots by mail, and the U.S.P.S. puts all of their votes at risk.”

A Postal Service official declined to comment on the record.

Voting by mail will become much more difficult, if not impossible, for tens of millions of Americans if the Postal Service is allowed to implement the restrictive rules governing mail voting that Mr. Trump has demanded.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly promoted false claims of widespread fraud through mail-in voting, which he has described as “cheating,” “corrupt” and “horrible,” even though he voted by mail in two elections this year. He has moved to restrict mail-in voting using a variety of procedural and legislative levers.

Those moves have led to a pileup of legal rulings and challenges surrounding the nation’s electoral system just two months before the midterm elections. The rules could especially affect states where some of the most competitive races for House, Senate and governor will determine control of Congress and state governments.

Michigan, where 37 percent of votes were cast by mail in 2022, would be one, with competitive statewide contests and multiple battleground House races. California, which mails ballots to all voters, is expected to be central to Democratic efforts to win control in the House.

The Supreme Court had allowed the Trump administration to move ahead with Mr. Trump’s mail ballot executive order, reasoning that a lawsuit challenging the order was premature because the administration had not started implementing its plans.

But days before the court ruled, the Postal Service formally published a new plan to comply with the executive order. Judge Indira Talwani, a Federal District Court judge in Massachusetts, reasoned that the stakes had changed with the new plan and temporarily blocked it, concluding that the agency’s plan appeared to overstep its legal mandate and could spark chaos by changing rules a little more than two months before an election.

The whistle-blower report provided specific details of the Postal Service’s effort to rapidly implement a new digital system for mail ballots, even as a federal appeals court had blocked the plan before the Supreme Court intervened. Work has also continued on the system even after Judge Talwani ordered the plan halted last week, the report said.

The official at the Postal Service raised “grave concerns” in the report that the verification process in the system could reject tens of thousands of ballots in a bulk-mailing batch if “even one bar code on one single ballot” failed to properly scan, and that the rushed, “slapdash” development of the system would significantly increase the chance of errors and other failures in the verification process.

Reid J. Epstein and Nick Corasaniti contributed reporting.

Chris Cameron is a Times reporter covering Washington, focusing on breaking news and the Trump administration.“