As President Joe Biden prepares to leave office, he’s accepting that he’ll have to leave some work undone.
Due to time constraints and concerns about the incoming Trump administration, Biden’s team recently withdrew a few high-profile policy proposals, including plans to prevent bans on transgender athletes in school sports and forgive additional student loans.
Here’s a look at why the proposed rule on transgender athletes, in particular, wasn’t pushed through.
Biden administration guidance on transgender athletes
The withdrawn rule on transgender athletes was proposed in 2023. It aimed to prevent schools from issuing outright bans on participation by transgender athletes in school sports, but it also allowed for restrictions when a transgender athlete was believed to have an unfair advantage, according to ESPN.
“Biden’s proposal left both sides of the issue asking for more. Advocates said it didn’t go far enough in protecting transgender students from school policies that could unfairly exclude them. Opponents said it fell short of protecting girls and ensuring fairness,” the article said.
Federal officials received more than 150,000 public comments on the policy draft.
The Biden administration’s decision to withdraw it stems in part from not having enough time to finish processing that feedback and in part from legal concerns.
Officials have been monitoring multiple lawsuits related to transgender athletes and were expecting additional litigation if it tried to finalize the proposed rule.
“The Education Department said that it had decided to withdraw the rule related to transgender athletes because of a variety of pending lawsuits on the issue,” The New York Times reported.
Concerns about Trump
The Biden administration’s withdrawal decision also stems from concerns about what the incoming Trump administration would do if the proposed rule on transgender athletes remained on the table.
The federal rulemaking process is complex and time-consuming. It involves issuing draft rules, collecting public feedback, making a good-faith effort to reflect on all that feedback and then publishing a final version of the rules, among other steps.
Even when everything is functioning smoothly, months pass between when a federal agency announces a planned rule change and when that rule actually takes effect.
But a shortcut becomes available to a new administration once it takes over for a departing administration: It can make changes to proposals that haven’t yet been finalized without starting the process over from the beginning.
By withdrawing some of its proposed rule changes, the Biden administration “helped ensure that the open proposals could not be quickly rewritten, and that the Trump administration would have to at least start the process of introducing its own regulations from scratch,” The New York Times reported.
Although it’s unclear what policy moves President-elect Donald Trump is planning related to transgender athletes, he expressed concern about transgender women competing against other women multiple times during his successful reelection bid, as the Deseret News previously reported.