USDA suspends funding to Maine college after governor challenged Trump

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The Trump administration has pulled hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of analysis funding from the College of Maine, months after the president publicly clashed with state Governor Janet Mills over the banning of transgender athletes from women’ sports activities.

In an e-mail obtained by the school from the U.S. Division of Agriculture, the company’s chief monetary officer ordered all funds paused whereas the division “evaluates if it ought to take any follow-on actions” associated to attainable civil rights violations on the college, based on Reuters.

UM stated in a press launch that it had obtained $30 million in USDA funding in fiscal yr 2024.

It comes following a now viral change between Trump and Mills throughout a gathering with governors on the White Home on final month. The president threatened the Democrat over compliance along with his govt order banning transgender girls and women from girls’s sports activities or threat dropping federal funding.

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“Are you not going to adjust to it?” Trump requested Mills, to which she replied: “I’m complying with state and federal legal guidelines.”

“We’re federal regulation,” Trump stated. “You higher do it. You higher do it, since you’re not going to get federal funding … Your inhabitants doesn’t need males in girls’s sports activities.”

“We’ll see you in court docket,” Mills replied.

“Good. I’ll see you in court docket. I’ll stay up for that. That needs to be an actual simple one,” Trump stated. “And luxuriate in your life after, governor, as a result of I don’t suppose you’ll be in elected politics.”

A day after the confrontation, the USDA introduced an investigation into whether or not the College of Maine was violating federal regulation prohibiting intercourse discrimination.

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The college stated on Tuesday that it had supplied responses to USDA confirming its athletic packages have been in compliance with state and federal regulation, in addition to the Nationwide Collegiate Athletic Affiliation’s coverage barring varsity athletes assigned male at delivery from competing in girls’s sports activities.

In keeping with the college, the USDA funding helps 4-H, a social and academic youth program; coaching to assist farmers handle pests; and analysis to make sure the sustainability of Maine’s lobster business, amongst different packages.

The Unbiased has reached out to the USDA, the College of Maine and Mills’ workplace for remark.

Trump beforehand signed an govt order to finish “the damaging and unfair participation of males in girls’s sports activities” by directing federal regulation enforcement businesses to take “quick motion” in opposition to faculties and associations that “deny girls single-sex sports activities and single-sex locker rooms,” based on a abstract from the White Home.

Throughout a signing ceremony surrounded by younger women, Trump claimed that the “radical left” has “waged an all-out marketing campaign to erase the very idea of organic intercourse and substitute it with a militant transgender ideology.”

The Unbiased’s Alex Woodward contributed reporting to this text.