Possibly the least surprising move ever. Not only was this last-second guidance completely at odds with the incoming administration's overall guiding principles, it was also at odds with the DOE's own historical interpretation of le IX.
Schools have NEVER distributed revenue evenly between men's and women's sports (your school's football coach probably earns as much as every woman's sport coach combined, your school's shiny new football-only training facility costs 8 figures, etc), but the accepted interpretation that as long as the opportunity to play (i.e., scholarships) was equivalent, that's all that mattered. Everybody followed this, universities banked on this, and the DOE never even hinted that this would be changing. Then four days before Inauguration Day, the DOE suddenly drops brand new guidance from the sky completely upending that.
This was never going to hold up; the only question was when the official announcement undoing that surprise guidance would end up coming.