President Donald Trump’s administration urged the Supreme Court on Friday to allow officials to gut the Department of Education, a key priority for the president that has been stymied by a series of lower court decisions.
The emergency appeal landed at the high court days after the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reverse a lower court order that halted mass firings at the department, which was created during the Carter administration. Trump has filed more than a dozen emergency appeals at the Supreme Court since he returned to office in January.
In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the administration argues 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.”
Though Trump has repeatedly vowed to get rid of the department, the administration’s lawyers told the Supreme Court in its filing on Friday that “the government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education.”
Trump ordered mass layoffs at the department earlier this year. The problem for the administration is that the department was created by Congress, and so lower courts have ruled it cannot be unilaterally unwound by the White House. At the same time, the administration does have the power to reduce the size of federal agencies, so long as they can continue to carry out their legal requirements.
And that, the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court, is precisely what the administration is attempting to do.
“The Department remains committed to implementing its statutorily mandated functions,” the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court in the appeal.
The Education Department 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.
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 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 Supreme Court is already considering a related emergency case about whether Trump can order mass firings and reorganizations in other federal departments.
“What is at stake in this case,” the 1st Circuit wrote, “was whether a nearly half-century-old cabinet department would be permitted to carry out its statutorily assigned functions or prevented from doing so by a mass termination of employees aimed at implementing the effective closure of that department.”
Trump’s order would have affected about half of the department’s employees, according to court records.
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