A federal appeals court declined on Wednesday to lift a judge’s ruling that blocked the Trump administration from effectively shutting down the Department of Education.
The unanimous decision from the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals is another significant legal setback for President Donald Trump, whose efforts to rapidly shrink the federal government – including through dismantling entire agencies – have been tied up in numerous court challenges.
Cutting the Department of Education has been of particular interest to Trump in his second term. Earlier this year, he moved ahead with mass layoffs at the agency, which is tasked with distributing federal aid to schools, managing federal aid for college students and ensuring compliance with civil rights laws.
The administration, 1st Circuit Chief Judge David Barron wrote for the panel, has not “shown that the public’s interest lies in permitting a major federal department to be unlawfully disabled from performing its statutorily assigned functions.”
The court also said that the administration had not demonstrated that it was likely to ultimately win in the case, with Barron writing that Justice Department attorneys had not put forth evidence showing how the widespread layoffs at the department would not prevent it from carrying out its core functions.
Last month, US District Judge Myong Joun of the federal court in Boston indefinitely halted Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency and ordered the administration to reinstate employees who had been fired en masse. The ruling came in a lawsuit brought by a teachers’ union, school districts, states and education groups.
Noting that the department “cannot be shut down without Congress’s approval,” Joun, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, said that the planned layoffs at the agency “will likely cripple” it.
“The record abundantly reveals that Defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute,” he wrote in the 88-page ruling.
Attorneys for the Department of Justice quickly asked the Boston-based appeals court to pause Joun’s ruling while they appealed it, writing in court papers that it “represents an extraordinary incursion on the Executive Branch’s authority to manage its workforce.”
“Beyond that, it requires the government to indefinitely retain and pay employees whose services it no longer requires, and the government cannot recoup those salaries if it prevails on appeal,” the DOJ attorneys wrote.
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