Trump looks to enforce trans inmate crackdown as new acting federal prisons chief tapped

William W. Lothrop was named the new BOP director after Colette Peters resigned on Inauguration Day. It's unclear when the Trump administration will appoint someone to permanently fill the role. 

The order specifies that individuals should be housed in federal prisons according to their biological sex rather than their gender identity, which will apply to the 2,300 transgender inmates currently housed in federal prisons across the U.S. It also halts federal funding for transgender procedures and treatments for inmates.

The agency has nearly 36,000 employees and is responsible for more than 155,000 federal inmates. The BOP director is not subject to Senate confirmation, according to the legal news service Law 360. During her tenure, Peters appeared before the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and spoke about the challenges the BOP faced, but she had trouble getting results. 

During the end of Trump's campaign, he pledged he would crack down on left-wing gender ideology and ran a successful ad campaign attacking his opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, for her role in ushering in sex change procedures for incarcerated people in California.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the White House and BOP for comment. 

Fox News Digital's Michael Dorgan contributed to this report.