U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi made the announcement Tuesday in an interview on Fox News Channel.
WASHINGTON, D.C., USA — U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s administration is pulling more than $1.5 million in funding for the Maine Department of Corrections (DOC).
Bondi made the announcement in an interview on Fox News Channel, saying all “nonessential” funding or the Maine DOC has been pulled because Maine was “allowing a man in a women’s prison.”
Andrea Balcer, formerly known as Andrew, was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2018 after murdering her parents and their family dog.
Her attorney argued that the then 17-year-old was going through gender identity transformation from Andrew to Andrea and that her parents were not accepting of her. She had no criminal record before the violence on Oct. 31, 2016, in the family’s Winthrop home.
A search of the Maine Department of Corrections’ online inmate database shows Balcer is currently incarcerated at the Maine Correctional Center’s Women’s Center.
“They were letting him be housed in a female prison. No longer. We will pull your funding, we will protect women in prison, we will protect women in sports, we will protect women throughout this country,” Bondi said. “No more of that.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has also paused federal funds for certain Maine educational programs over the state’s compliance with Title IX.
“We were right to do that,” Bondi said Tuesday. “President Trump has the right to determine where the money goes, where federal money goes.”
Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, does not explicitly address transgender athlete participation. However, President Donald Trump’s administration has interpreted the law differently, asserting that transgender athletes should not compete on teams aligning with their gender identity.
Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins sent a letter to Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills Wednesday, saying funding for “certain administrative and technological functions” had been paused amid an ongoing review of federal funding Maine receives from the USDA.
The funding pause comes after several federal investigations were launched into Maine’s compliance with Title IX over transgender athletes’ participation in girls’ and women’s sports.
In February, a public spat between President Donald Trump and Mills regarding a recent executive order targeting transgender athletes thrust the state and its current protocols into the national spotlight.
The Maine Department of Education, the Maine Principals’ Association, and a high school were each found in violation of Title IX. Last week, the federal government issued its “final warning” to all parties to sign a resolution agreement by April 11 or it will send the case to the Justice Department.
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