The federal budget gives Congress a good tool for limiting rogue agencies and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights needs to be limited. Unfortunately, President Obama and 22 senators — including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters — want to give OCR more money instead.

That money would fund a continuing war on due process of law.

It is a war that was declared five years ago. In a “Dear Colleague” letter to educators across the country, OCR announced new, lower standards for how colleges and universities should deal with accusations of sexual misconduct. And it warned that schools that offered a higher standard of justice could lose access to federal funding.

The Dear Colleague letter requires schools to adjudicate rape cases by a “preponderance of the evidence” standard. In other words, if a woman accuses a man of raping her, he denies it, and there’s no other evidence, the school must find him responsible if it thinks she is even slightly more likely to be telling the truth than he is.

And that’s not the only way OCR’s letter attacks due process. The OCR discourages cross-examination of the accusers, either by the accused (understandable) or their lawyers (unacceptable). Cross-examination is one of the best ways to find the gaps in someone’s story. Worse, some schools don’t allow accused students to be represented by lawyers.

And the letter says that if an accused student manages to win his case despite all this, his accuser gets to appeal it. That means he might have to defend himself again and again on the same charges.

Over the past five years, colleges and universities have changed their policies to comply with the letter and go beyond it. Schools that used to require that serious misconduct be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (as in a criminal case), or by clear and convincing evidence, have lowered their standards.

OCR has also declared that sexual violence is a form of sexual harassment and sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. So any charge of sexual harassment is covered by the same rules. And according to OCR, sexual harassment can include “verbal conduct” — that is, speech.

The 22 senators say in their letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee that OCR has gotten busier, with a lot of complaints to investigate. Of course it has.

After one investigation, OCR told the University of Montana that sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.” The university’s requirement that the conduct create a hostile environment, OCR said, was too limiting: the university ought to intervene, OCR said, before a hostile environment appears.

What?

A preemptive strike against harassment? You cannot get broader than that.

If we take seriously the idea that all unwanted speech with a possible sexual implication is harassment, anyone who asks a classmate on a date runs the risk that the invitation will be defined as harassment.

In just the past two months, four students who sued their universities over the way they treated them when they were accused of sexual misconduct have won victories at one stage or another in their cases, according to Inside Higher Ed. And now, Reason magazine reports, a student who received a multiyear suspension for what his “victim” consistently said was consensual sex has sued not only his school, but OCR too.

In its well-intentioned zealotry to defend women not only against real threats but against potential ones, the OCR has abandoned the concept of due process of law. It needs to be reined in.

First Published April 25, 2016, 4:00 a.m.