Republican members of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce advanced H.R. 8705 on Thursday. The bill would ban federally funded civics and history programs from promoting “radical indoctrination” or “gender ideology” and “discriminatory equity ideology,” scare words that refer to transgender identities and anti-racist education.
The bill — the Civics and History Advancement to Restore Learning, Integrity, and Education (CHARLIE) Act, named after slain MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk — would censor topics in federally funded American history, civics, and government classes in public schools. The bill would also prohibit the Department of Education from prioritizing grant applicants based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or immigration status.
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The bill could affect programs supported by the American History and Civics Education initiative, the Presidential and Congressional Academies for American History and Civics, as well as other federally funded national civics education efforts, The Advocate reported.
In May, Democrats offered multiple amendments to ensure that schools would still be permitted to teach students about slavery, immigration, the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, LGBTQ+ history, and Jeffrey Epstein’s relationships with current and former government officials. However, committee Republicans rejected every single one.
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Specifically, the bill prevents such classes from promoting “gender ideology,” which the Trump administration defines as “an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity” that requires institutions to take as true “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”
“Gender ideology includes the idea that there is a vast spectrum of genders that are disconnected from one’s sex” and “diminishes sex as an identifiable or useful category,” while maintaining “that it is possible for a person to be born in the wrong sexed body,” the administration wrote in a 2025 executive order, which the bill cites as the basis for its censorship.
The bill would also ban classes from promoting “discriminatory equity ideology,” which the administration defines as any “ideology that treats individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals.”
This ideology occurs, the administration says, when educators point out that any group could be consciously or unconsciously oppressive, oppressed, privileged; that any group should “receive adverse treatment to achieve diversity, equity, or inclusion [DEI]”; that “virtues such as merit, excellence, hard work, fairness, neutrality, objectivity, and racial colorblindness” aid the oppression of other groups; or that “the United States is fundamentally racist, sexist, or otherwise discriminatory.”
In a statement, out gay Rep. Mark Takano (D-CA), Chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus and Senior Member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, said, “Censoring American history doesn’t change what happened — it dooms future generations to forget and potentially repeat the mistakes of the past. Importantly, denying the existence of transgender people and the lasting effects of racism on American society does nothing to make American education better.”
“This bill censors some of the leading government-funded history and civics educational programs in an act of unacceptable overreach,” Takano continued. “Denying the lasting impacts Jim Crow and slavery have had on American society is denying reality, and restricting educators from honing their knowledge on these dark — but important — topics is an incredibly dangerous disservice to American students. I will keep working with my colleagues in the Equality Caucus to prevent this bill from becoming law.”
On Thursday, the House passed a “Don’t Say Trans” bill that would force teachers to out trans students nationwide — eight Democrats voted to help pass it.
The bill requires public schools to get parental permission before using the correct names and pronouns for transgender students or risk losing access to federal funding. The Congressional Equality Caucus (CEC), a group of pro-LGBTQ+ lawmakers in Congress, notes that there are no exceptions in the bill for potentially abusive situations, meaning that if a trans kid requests they be addressed with a certain name or referred to with certain pronouns and isn’t aware of this law, their potentially abusive parents will be contacted without their consent.
The other part of the bill says schools can’t “teach or advance concepts related to gender ideology.” Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s national counterterrorism strategy classified groups that support “transgender ideology” as terrorist organizations.
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