WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday gave President Trump the authority to dismantle the Education Department and to fire about half of its staff.
In a 6-3 decision, the court’s conservatives set aside a Boston judge’s order and cleared the way for Education Secretary Linda McMahon to carry out her plans to shut down much of her department.
The court issued a brief order with no explanation, followed by a 19-page dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor that spoke for the three liberals.
“Only Congress has the power to abolish the Department. The Executive’s task, by contrast, is to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,’” she wrote.
“Yet, by executive fiat, the President ordered the Secretary of Education to ‘take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department’ … Consistent with that Executive Order, Secretary Linda McMahon gutted the Department’s work force, firing over 50 percent of its staff overnight. In her own words, that mass termination served as ‘the first step on the road to a total shutdown’ of the Department.”
McMahon called the decision 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.”
The Department of Education was created in 1979 under President Carter, and it has been a favorite of Democrats since then. It sends funds to school districts across the nation to support extra help for students, including those with disabilities, and it administers programs for grants and loans for students in colleges and universities.
Republicans have been eager to dismantle the Education Department for decades. They say education policy should be left mostly to states and argue that the teachers unions have too much sway in Washington.
But they also say they would not change or block the federal funding that now goes to support schools and higher education students.
Last week, the court upheld the Trump administration plans for mass layoffs in the more than 20 departments and agencies.
Attorneys for California and 10 other Democratic-led states had sued to block the planned layoffs of about 1,400 Education Department employees, and they won before a federal judge in Boston and the 1st Circuit Court.
Those judges said Congress could reduce or redirect funding from the Education Department, but the president was not free to do it on his own.
But in last week’s order as well as Monday’s, the court’s majority sided with Trump and his broad view of executive power.
Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, said the administration decided it can “carry out its statutorily mandated functions with a pared-down staff” at the Education Department.
Democracy Forward, a progressive group that sued on behalf of educators, said it was “incredibly disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Trump-Vance administration to proceed with its harmful efforts to dismantle the Department of Education while our case moves forward. This unlawful plan will immediately and irreparably harm students, educators and communities across our nation.”
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