Trump administration restores $175 million to Penn after deal reached on trans athletes
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Updated July 2, 2025, 1:56 p.m. ET | Published July 2, 2025, 11:58 a.m. ET
President Donald Trump’s administration has restored $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania after it reached a deal on transgender athletes, a Department of Education spokesperson confirmed Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Penn said it had agreed to apologize to members of its women’s swim team who were “disadvantaged” by transgender swimmer Lia Thomas’ participation on the team in 2021-22 and remove Thomas’ records, giving them instead to swimmers who held the next best times.
The school also agreed to abide by IX — the civil rights law that prohibits sexual harassment and discrimination — “as interpreted by the Department of Education” in regard to athletics and specifically cite by name Trump’s executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” and state that all its practices, policies and procedures in women’s athletics will comply with it.
Penn also repeated what it has previously said, that transgender women would not be permitted to compete on women’s teams, in line with the National Collegiate Athletic Association decision earlier this year to bar them. The Trump administration had announced in March that it was pausing $175 million in federal funding because Thomas had competed on the women’s swim team. Trump campaigned on keeping transgender athletes out of women’s sports. Penn did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the status of the funding.
Read more: https://www.inquirer.com/education/upenn-lia-thomas-education-department-agreement-transgender-20250702.html