At present, the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions is considering the nomination of Catherine Lhamon to head the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. This is the notorious office responsible for enforcement of Title IX and in particular the kangaroo court system around sexual offenses on university campuses. Lhamon lead the OCR during the Obama administration, and is in large part responsible for pushing the investigatory and administrative processes of that era.

In a recent hearing, Lhamon was asked whether she would maintain a presumption of innocence in Title IX regulations, and in response Lhamon asserted that this presumption does not currently exist in the regulations. There are a number of problems with this.

First and foremost, the current regulations do include a presumption of innocence. Looking at the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 34 Subtitle B, Section 106.45, basic requirements in the grievance process for formal complaints of sexual harassment must:

Include a presumption that the respondent is not responsible for the alleged conduct until a determination regarding responsibility is made at the conclusion of the grievance process

Indeed, at the 1:44:20 mark Senator Burr returns to this point, asking explicitly whether Lhamon thinks the standard should be presumption of innocence. Lhamon equivocates for some time, demurring that she has no power to impose her views and values through the OCR (not quite true), before giving the noncommittal answer that:

civil rights investigators, investigators at schools, need to start from the presumption that the facts are what they are, and you need to out what they are. they shouldn’t be assuming a person is guilty just because the person been accused— ‘guilt’ is not even the right word, so now I’ve walked into the criminal process—they shouldn’t be assuming that someone is responsible because a person has been accused, they should be open to the possibility that the person is not.

Not a presumption of innocence, but investigators should be "open to the possibility" of innocence.

Furthermore, Lhamon has in the past objected very strenuously when the DoE under DeVos strengthened the rights of the accused. In the recent hearing at the 1:29:04 mark, Lhamon confirms that in her view, the DeVos guidelines "permit[s] students to rape and sexually harass with impunity".

It seems likely that the near future holds a crackdown on the legal rights of male university students, on the right to due process, and the presumption of innocence.