The Washington, D.C., headquarters of the U.S. Department of Education shown in March.
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Win McNamee/Getty Images North America
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that it would allow the Trump administration to resume dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.
The court stayed a preliminary injunction issued in May by a federal judge in Massachusetts. That injunction had directed the administration to stop gutting the department and to reinstate many of the nearly 1,400 workers the government had laid off.
Monday’s ruling is not the final word, as the case continues to work its way through the lower courts. But it deals a serious blow to the states and schools districts who had filed suit and who worry that, without an injunction, much of the damage done to the department before a final ruling will be impossible to reverse.
The court’s decision was unsigned, and the majority did not explain its thinking.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor did offer a sharp dissent, saying the decision is “indefensible” and that “it hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
In a press release, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said, “While today’s ruling is a significant win for students and families, it is a shame that the highest court in the land had to step in to allow President Trump to advance the reforms Americans elected him to deliver using the authorities granted to him by the U.S. Constitution.”
Monday’s ruling was set in motion on May 22, when U.S. District Court Judge Myong J. Joun issued a preliminary injunction, blocking President Trump and McMahon from carrying out an executive order calling for the closure of the Education Department. Joun also ordered the administration “to restore the Department to the status quo” and, more specifically, to rehire the hundreds of employees who were told in March they would lose their jobs.
“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” Joun wrote in May. “This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”
That injunction also temporarily barred Trump from following through on a pledge he made in the Oval Office to move management of the entire federal student loan portfolio and the department’s “special needs” programs to other federal agencies.
On June 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed with Joun’s assessment that the deep staffing cuts have made it “effectively impossible for the Department to carry out its statutory functions.”
In his application to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the Trump administration that “the government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education” and that these staffing cuts were not part of a department gutting but simply an effort at “streamlining” and thus within the executive’s purview.
“The Constitution vests the Executive Branch, not district courts, with the authority to make judgments about how many employees are needed to carry out an agency’s statutory functions,” Sauer wrote.
In their written defense of Joun’s injunction, the plaintiffs’ attorneys told the Supreme Court that, “if the dismantling of the Department is allowed to go forward now,” even if they ultimately win their case in court, “it will be effectively impossible to undo much of the damage caused.”
The case is the consolidation of two separate cases, each brought in March in response to the administration’s sweeping moves to shrink and eventually close the Education Department. The plaintiffs include 20 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), two school districts and other unions.
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