The Supreme Court on Monday said President Donald Trump may proceed with his plan to carry out mass layoffs at the Department of Education in the latest win for the White House at the conservative high court.
In an unsigned order, the justices lifted for now a lower court ruling that had indefinitely paused Trump’s plan. The Supreme Court’s decision puts that ruling on hold while the legal challenge plays out.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, said her colleagues had made an “indefensible” decision to let Trump proceed with taking apart an agency that ordinarily can be dismantled only by Congress.
“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,” Sotomayor wrote in the dissent, which was joined in full by the other two liberal justices.
Trump ordered mass layoffs at the department earlier this year — cutting its workforce in half — but lower courts have blocked that effort, noting that the Education Department was created by Congress.
Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement described the court’s decision as a “significant win for students and families.”
“We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most — to students, parents, and teachers,” she said. “As we return education to the states, this Administration will continue to perform all statutory duties while empowering families and teachers by reducing education bureaucracy.”
US District Judge Myong Joun, nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, indefinitely halted Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency and ordered the administration to reinstate about 1,400 employees who had been fired en masse. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a teachers union, school districts, states and education groups.
Noting that the department “cannot be shut down without Congress’s approval,” Joun said Trump’s planned layoffs “will likely cripple” it. “The record abundantly reveals that defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” he wrote.
The Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously declined to reverse that order in early June and Trump appealed.
Sotomayor warns of ‘untold harm’
The Education Department, created during the Carter administration, is tasked with distributing federal aid to schools, managing federal aid for college students and ensuring compliance with civil rights laws — including ensuring schools accommodate students with disabilities. Most public-school policies are a function of state government.
In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration countered that its effort at the Education Department involves “internal management decisions” and “eliminating discretionary functions that, in the administration’s view, are better left to the states.”
Despite Trump’s campaign trail promises to eliminate the department entirely, his lawyers told the Supreme Court that wasn’t what is happening in this case. Instead, they said, the department could continue to carry out its legally obligated functions — just with far fewer employees.
Sotomayor made clear in her dissent that she thought Trump’s arguments to the high court disregarded the reality on the ground.
“The record unambiguously refutes that account,” she wrote. “Neither the President nor Secretary McMahon made any secret of their intent to ignore their constitutional duties. President Trump repeatedly called for the immediate abolition of the Department both during his campaign and after taking office.”
She continued: “Rather than wait for legislative action to begin shuttering the Department, McMahon slashed the agency’s work force in half, concededly without analyzing the effect of those terminations on the Department’s statutorily mandated functions.”
The court’s decision, Sotomayor wrote, “will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”
“The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
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