The Supreme Court agreed on Monday that the Trump administration can proceed with dismantling the Education Department by firing thousands of workers.
The order is a significant victory for the administration and could ease President Trump’s efforts to sharply curtail the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.
It also represents an expansion of presidential power, allowing Mr. Trump to functionally eliminate a government department created by Congress without legislators’ input.
It comes after a decision by the justices last week that cleared the way for the Trump administration to move forward with cutting thousands of jobs across a number of federal agencies, including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury.
The order by the court was unsigned and gave no reasoning, as is typical in such emergency applications. No vote count was given, which is usual for emergency orders, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by the court’s other two liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The order is technically temporary, applying while appeals proceed through the courts. In practice, thousands of fired workers whom a Boston judge had ordered be reinstated are now again subject to removal from their jobs.
Mr. Trump signed an executive order on March 20 instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to start shutting down the federal agency, which manages federal loans for college, monitors student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities. Trump administration officials cited low test scores by students as the reason to dismantle the department.
“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said during the ceremony where he signed the executive order.
The move immediately set up a legal fight over the future of the department because it was created by an act of Congress, and legislators had not given approval to eliminate it.
Shortly after, two school districts, the American Federation of Teachers and 21 Democratic state attorneys general filed a legal challenge in federal court in Massachusetts. The challengers asked a judge to block the executive order and to unwind a round of layoffs that gutted the department’s work force by about half.
Lawyers for the challengers argued that the administration’s plans would interfere with the department’s ability to carry out functions required by law.
On May 22, Judge Myong J. Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the fired employees while the lawsuit was pending. Judge Joun, who was nominated to the bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said he agreed that only Congress could eliminate the department and that the administration’s actions amounted to an illegal shutdown of the agency.
On June 4, a panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld Judge Joun’s ruling. Two days later, the Trump administration filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, asking it to intervene and lift the trial judge’s order. In the filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that Judge Joun had “thwarted the executive branch’s authority to manage the Department of Education.”
In response, lawyers for the challengers argued that the agency’s leaders had “set out to destroy the agency by executive fiat” and without the support of Congress.
In court filings, the challengers asserted that the trial judge had properly determined that the government was likely to lose its argument that it had not eliminated the department. Judge Joun properly recognized that just because “a skeleton crew remains” at the Education Department, that did not mean the Trump administration was “faithfully carrying out Congress’s mission” in what was effectively “tearing the department down to the plywood,” they argued.
The Trump administration replied in court filings that the department had “determined that it can carry out its statutorily mandated functions with a pared-down staff and that many discretionary functions are better left to the states.”
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
The post Supreme Court Clears the Way for Trump’s Cuts to the Education Department appeared first on New York Times.
