Who Is Kimberly Richey, the Nominee to Lead OCR?

President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights is no stranger to Washington: She’s worked in the department twice before, under George W. Bush and during Trump’s first term, and served as acting assistant secretary of OCR from August 2020 until November 2021.

But she was still an unexpected pick for assistant secretary of the office and is relatively unknown in the higher education world. Her nomination comes at a uniquely fraught time for the office. OCR officials spent much of the past year fielding a spate of reports of antisemitic and anti-Palestinian discrimination but have reportedly pivoted in recent weeks to address some of Trump’s key priorities, including alleged discrimination against white students.

“We’re watching daily updates as the office is weaponized to tear down the racial progress, the disability justice work, the gender justice work that has been the work of the agency since before it was created,” said Liz King, senior program director for education equity at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of civil rights interest groups. “The most relevant question, and arguably the only relevant question about Kim Richey … is whether [she] will show up on the side of students and families and educators and the law or whether [she] will show up on the side of Trump and Musk. That is what the Senate must ask Kim Richey, and that’s what Kim Richey must ask herself.”

Here are four things to know about the woman who may soon be put in charge of ensuring students are given equal access to education—if she is confirmed by the Senate.

She’s been consulting and collaborating with conservative governments and think tanks for years.

Richey’s most recent role, which she took in summer 2023, was as a senior chancellor at the Florida Department of Education, a high-ranking position in the commissioner of education’s office. But according to a résumé published by the government watchdog American Oversight, she spent the years preceding that role working with several conservative organizations to draft education-related legislation, policies and regulation. Those policy proposals were mostly centered on K-12 and included bans on critical race theory—the graduate-level legal principle that racism is systemic, rather than limited to an individual’s actions or views—promoting school choice, providing parents increased transparency regarding what their children are learning, including schools’ “diversity/equity plans,” and more.

A February 2022 receipt uncovered by American Oversight indicated that Richey’s consultancy, RealignEd LLC, was paid $10,000 to “provide subject matter expertise, review and evaluation, and policy advice related to inherently divisive topics and other provisions” shortly after Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order prohibiting “the use of inherently divisive concepts” in schools.

Though most of her experience has been in K-12 education, her role with the Florida department is focused on higher education. According to her biography as part of the executive steering committee of a state workforce program, Richey “is responsible for Florida’s public and nonpublic institutions of higher education—overseeing the Divisions of Florida Colleges, Career and Adult Education, Vocational Rehabilitation, Blind Services, the Florida Department of Education’s Office of Workforce Education and Economic Alignment, and the Commission for Independent Education.”

She opposes Title IX protections for trans students.

Richey has spoken critically about the protections for transgender students included in former president Joe Biden’s short-lived Title IX rules. On a webinar with the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, she criticized the regulations for allowing trans students to use locker rooms and bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

“Unfortunately, under the final rule, there are certain intimate facilities that are not included in those exceptions, and that’s why you’re hearing the outcry from folks across the country,” she said, referring to the spate of lawsuits that were swiftly filed against the Biden rules. (A federal judge in Kentucky eventually struck down the rule just before Trump’s inauguration, and ED instructed institutions to refer to the 2020 regulations.)

She also seemed to imply that the protections for transgender students could infringe on First Amendment rights, saying that the 2024 regulations “left open this idea of whether not abiding by someone’s pronouns would be misgendering, and we know from their recent enforcement that they have held schools in violation of Title IX for allowing misgendering of students.”

That perspective is in line with the administration’s overall efforts to reverse rights and protections for transgender individuals, including an executive order that banned transgender women from playing on women’s athletics teams.

She has played a role in Florida’s crusade against antisemitism.

According to reporting by ProPublica, antisemitism will be a key issue for the OCR under the Trump administration, which will likely take the controversial stance that most, if not all, speech critical of Israel is antisemitic.

Florida has similarly taken a hard-line stance against anti-Israel speech at its colleges and universities, taking actions like banning the pro-Palestinian student group Students for Justice in Palestine on two public university campuses in the weeks following Oct. 7, 2023 (though this was later reversed).

Richey appears to have played a role in those actions; she is copied on a memorandum sent from Education Commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. to public college leaders requiring them to review course materials related to Israel and Palestine for antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias.

Meanwhile, two fellows at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute wrote a blog post supporting her and other ED appointees: “We hope and expect that from her new post, she will put an end to the Biden-Harris team’s unconscionable ‘catch and release’ approach to antisemitism, where some of the worst offenses in decades were treated with indifference, with administrators who ignored or enabled them receiving the lightest possible slaps on the wrist.” Richey has previously worked with AEI.

She is also a longtime collaborator of Kenneth Marcus, the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law who is spearheading the national effort to fight alleged antisemitism on campuses. The center has filed about two dozen lawsuits claiming academic institutions and organizations have failed to protect their students and members against antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023, plus a lawsuit against ED for allegedly violating its own policies when it dismissed a complaint of alleged antisemitism at the University of Pennsylvania.

Richey worked under him as a principal deputy assistant secretary when he led the OCR, and they penned a joint op-ed in the political news outlet The Hill criticizing how the Biden-led government collected data on sexual misconduct in schools.

In its announcement of Richey’s nomination, the White House quoted Marcus lauding her past work with the department: “I have known Kim Richey for over twenty years, having supervised her work during the George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump (I) administrations, and I can say without reservation that she is one of the most impressive professionals with whom I have ever worked: exceptionally smart, effective, and honest, with a deep commitment to improving civil rights and education for the American people."

What she did as acting assistant secretary

Richey’s history with OCR goes back two decades, when she worked as counsel to the assistant secretary fresh out of law school, according to her résumé.

But her brief time leading the office didn’t come until 2020, after Marcus stepped down from the position, when she served as acting assistant secretary through the end of Trump’s first term and amid COVID-19 school closures. As acting assistant secretary, she sent letters to three school districts and one state education department announcing proactive investigations into purported discrimination against disabled students who were not appropriately accommodated during virtual learning or the return to in-person schooling, Politico reported at the time.

In an introduction to OCR’s 2020 annual report, Richey praised the office for resolving more complaints in Trump’s four years than in either of the past two administrations had in a single term, and outlined what she saw as “OCR’s most important priorities moving forward.” Those priorities included the enforcement of Trump’s Title IX regulations and the enforcement of Title VI “to combat anti-Semitism and the adoption of race-exclusionary policies and practices promoting and advocating the categorization of students by race.”