WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light Monday to forge ahead with layoffs of more than 1,300 workers at the Department of Education and continue its effort to dismantle the agency completely.
In an unsigned order, the justices lifted a Boston federal judge’s ruling that blocked the firings and ordered the White House to hire back those who had already been dismissed.
All three of the court’s liberal justices dissented from the order, which sends the dispute back to the Boston-based 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that allowing the White House to go forward with the dismissals “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.”
“The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naïve, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
US District Judge Myong Joun had ruled May 22 that congressional approval was required for such a large-scale dismissal of staff — and rejected the administration’s argument that it was merely reorganizing the department. Joun warned that the layoffs would “will likely cripple the department.”
On March 20, Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities”.
Nine days earlier, the department laid off 1,315 employees in what it deemed the beginning of a process to reduce its work force by half.
McMahon applauded the high court’s emergency order, and vowed to continue delivering on the “mandate to restore excellence in American education.”
“Today, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the President of the United States, as the head of the Executive Branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies,” she said in a statement.
“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.”
To formally abolish the Department of Education, Trump would need the approval of Congress, which appears unlikely given the GOP’s razor-thin majority in both chambers and the need to overcome a 60-vote legislative filibuster in the Senate.
Solicitor General John Sauer had decried Joun’s May ruling as tantamount to “wresting of an entire Cabinet department from presidential control.”
“That is a quintessential decision about managing internal executive-branch functions and the federal workforce that the Constitution reserves to the Executive Branch alone.”
A group of Democrat-led states had sued the Trump administration over the move and argued that Trump was exceeding his authority with the layoffs, which were designed to usher in the “closure of the Department of Education.”–
