A whistleblower inside Biden's Department of Education has been fully vindicated after flagging that senior officials literally invented a legal loophole to keep pushing gender identity mandates on schools — even after a federal judge told them to knock it off. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel has now confirmed what Timothy Mattson, a regional director in the Office for Civil Rights, risked his career to expose.
Imagine that. A federal judge issues an injunction, and these "faithful public servants" just... made up a workaround. Because the agenda is more important than the law to these people.
Here's what happened. In 2022, U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley — a Trump nominee, naturally — issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Biden Education Department from reinterpreting Title IX to include gender identity mandates. That should have been the end of it. A court order is a court order.
But former OCR Assistant Secretary Catherine Lhamon, who served under both Obama and Biden, reportedly dismissed the injunction, saying "the preliminary injunction really doesn't accomplish anything." Let that sink in. A court tells you to stop, and your response is that it doesn't matter.
Mattson, who ran the OCR's Kansas City regional office (Region VII), blew the whistle when he saw headquarters pressuring regional offices to keep pursuing gender identity cases in defiance of the court order. According to Just The News, leadership was "actively engaged in efforts to thwart at least one regional office from following the plain and unambiguous meaning" of Judge Atchley's injunction. And it wasn't just Kansas City — the Chicago, Atlanta, and Cleveland regional offices were affected too.
The man didn't set out to be a hero. "I will testify either in court or before Congress if I'm called to do that. I did not set out to be a whistleblower," Mattson said. He just saw the law being broken and refused to play along. What a concept.
The whistleblower advocacy group Empower Oversight backed Mattson's case. Their president, Tristan Leavitt, described how OCR leadership was "bullying them into consent decrees or other agreements when those local school districts were under threat." In other words, they weren't just ignoring the judge — they were strong-arming schools into compliance with rules that a court had already struck down.
Senior counsel Bobby Cheren of Empower Oversight noted that the Office of Special Counsel's recommendations are "as close to calling for firings as you're going to see from the OSC." The initial OSC report dropped back in December 2024 under the Biden administration, with a supplemental report following on February 19. Both painted the same picture: rogue bureaucrats who thought they were above the judiciary.
And where's Catherine Lhamon now? She landed softly at UC Berkeley Law's Edley Center on Law & Democracy. Because of course she did. You defy a federal court, bully schools into adopting your ideology, and your punishment is a cushy gig at Berkeley.
One of the cases involved Owasso Public Schools in Oklahoma, investigated following the suicide of a student named Nex Benedict. Even tragedy wasn't off-limits for these people — they weaponized it to keep the machine running while a federal injunction gathered dust on someone's desk.
This is what the deep state looks like in practice. Not shadowy figures in underground bunkers — just mid-level bureaucrats who decide that judges don't apply to them. Mattson proved it, the OSC confirmed it, and now the record is set. The only question left is whether anyone actually gets fired.
