The Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Trump to resume efforts to dismantle the Department of Education in an apparent 6-3 vote along ideological lines, lifting a judge’s order to reinstate hundreds of employees terminated in mass layoffs.
The administration’s victory enables the president to move closer to fulfilling of one of his major campaign promises to oversee the elimination of the Education Department, which was created in the 1970s.
The majority did not explain its reasoning, as is typical in emergency decisions. The court’s three Democratic-appointed justices publicly dissented, calling their colleagues’ ruling “indefensible.”
“It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
“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,” they continued.
Since entering office, the administration has sought to lay off half of the Education Department’s workforce and move some of the agency’s core functions, such as managing student loans, to other federal departments.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun blocked those efforts in May. Ruling that Trump needed congressional authorization, Joun ordered the administration reinstate the roughly 1,400 workers laid off in March.
The Supreme Court’s ruling lifts Joun’s injunction as the litigation proceeds in the lower courts, but it is not a final decision. The dispute could return to the justices.
Following the ruling, Education Secretary Linda McMahon vowed to carry out the layoffs once again.
“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,” McMahon said in a statement.
It marks the latest Trump administration victory at the Supreme Court, which has regularly intervened on its emergency docket to rein in lower judges who have blocked the president’s initiatives.
Days earlier, the justices enabled the administration to resume planning large-scale layoffs across a wider swath of the federal bureaucracy.
The high court previously enabled Trump to resume swiftly deporting migrants to countries where they have no ties, providing Department of Government Efficiency personnel with access to Social Security data and revoking temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of migrants, among other policies.
And the high court once before rebuked Joun, an appointee of former President Biden, in another case against the administration: The justices in April voted 5-4 to lift the judge’s order reinstating $65 million in federal teacher development grants.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer described Joun’s latest ruling as “wresting of an entire Cabinet department from presidential control.”
Sauer acknowledged the Education Department can only be completely eliminated by Congress, but he contended Trump was acting within his authority, pointing to the education secretary’s insistence that all the department’s legally mandated duties would continue.
“The Department of Education has 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,” Sauer wrote in court filings.
“That is a quintessential decision about managing internal executive-branch functions and the federal workforce that the Constitution reserves to the Executive Branch alone,” he continued.
The plaintiffs — two separate coalitions of Democratic-led states, school districts and unions — argued it is impossible for the department to carry out its mandatory functions with the changes that have been made to the agency.
“Petitioners cannot get around congressional limits on their authority by terminating half the agency, including entire teams devoted to statutory functions. This action exceeds the executive’s proper role,” the states wrote in court filings.
The administration also argued the plaintiffs don’t have legal standing to sue and must bring their claims before a civil service board, not a federal district judge.
The administration can keep pressing those arguments as the case returns to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is still hearing the administration’s appeal of Joun’s injunction in normal course.
It could ultimately return to the Supreme Court.
Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, a left-leaning legal group that represents the school districts and unions suing, condemned the majority’s lack of explanation and vowed to press ahead in the case.
“On its shadow docket, the Court has yet again ruled to overturn the decision of two lower courts without argument,” Perryman said in a statement.
“While this is disappointing, the Trump-Vance administration’s actions to decimate a department established by Congress are still unconstitutional. No court in the nation — not even the Supreme Court — has found that what the administration is doing is lawful,” she continued.
Regardless, the goal to completely abolish the department will likely go unaccomplished, as there would be difficulty getting the votes in the House and Senate, despite both being controlled by Republicans.
Updated at 4:23 p.m. EDT
This story has been updated to reflect the case returning to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
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