President Donald Trump’s Wednesday executive order combating radical gender ideology and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) education in public schools could prove disastrous for Maine’s far-left school districts, which could risk losing part of their funding.

The order also seeks to stop schools from indoctrinating children with DEI principles that claim people are inherently oppressors or victims, and teaching some children to believe themselves to be blameworthy or inherently evil because of the color of their skin.

Under the new rules, any public schools caught teaching discriminatory DEI principles such as “white privilege” or promoting gender ideology by doing things like helping a child present himself as the opposite gender and “socially transition” without parental knowledge could completely lose federal funding.

Parental rights advocacy groups, such as the American Parents Coalition, celebrated the order as a major victory.

“During the pandemic, many parents got an inside look into their children’s school curriculum and were rightfully horrified to find political indoctrination incorporated into lesson plans. Political ideologies and activist agendas, such as Critical Race Theory and gender ideology, were taking priority over core competencies like reading, math, and science,” said the group’s executive director, Alleigh Marré.

“When parents sounded the alarm, they were labeled as domestic terrorists and told that their voice didn’t matter. President Trump’s executive order today puts parents back in the driver’s seat and puts education back at the forefront of schools. This is a crucial step forward to ensure children continue to recover from learning loss and are given opportunities to thrive,” Marré continued.

In addition to fighting radical left-wing indoctrination, Trump’s order re-establishes the 1776 Commission to educate children on American history, the nation’s founding principles of merit and equality under the law, and the U.S. Constitution.

In the final months of his first term, Trump signed an executive order creating the commission, but President Joe Biden reversed the order on the first day of his presidency.

Following an earlier order from President Trump codifying the biological reality of two sexes, requiring biological sex to be used on official documents, and preventing biological men from being placed in women’s prisons, the Maine Department of Education called on schools to resist the order.

The letter reminded schools that the order only applied to federal institutions and demanded that they comply with Maine law codifying gender identity as a legally protected characteristic.

The new order does nothing to alter Maine law, but it does impose penalties on local schools that continue to support gender ideology and racial discrimination in the form of DEI by withholding essential federal funding.

The Maine Wire reached out to the Maine Department of Education (DOE), asking if they plan to change their position on gender ideology and DEI in light of the possible loss of federal funding, but they did not immediately respond.

Trump’s threat to pull federal funding from schools that indoctrinate children into DEI and trans ideology came shortly after a group of 29 Maine Republican representatives penned a letter warning the DOE to comply with Trump’s order targeting gender ideology. Approximately ten percent of Maine’s education budget comes from federal funding.

That letter appeared to do nothing to sway the department, although it may be forced to change its policies if it loses federal funding.

“State representatives are calling on the Maine Department of Education to face reality and walk back it’s ill-advised guidance to Maine schools on harmful Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and gender ideology initiatives,” wrote the state representatives.

The Maine Republicans celebrated Trump’s order as a return to reality and criticized Maine schools for focusing on indoctrinating children into left-wing beliefs rather than educating them.