The United States Supreme Court has ruled in favor of President Donald Trump’s administration, allowing it to proceed with plans to slash funding and resources for the federal Department of Education. The court’s conservative majority lifted a federal judge’s order that had reinstated nearly 1,400 workers affected by mass layoffs at the department and blocked the administration from transferring key functions to other federal agencies.
Shihab Rattansi noted that the top court’s decision is a “massive win” for the Trump administration. “The Department of Education was set up in 1979 by Congress, and only an act of Congress could shut it down, but instead, what the Trump administration is doing is sacking so many people within the Department of Education that effectively, it is shut down,” Rattansi said. He added that the Supreme Court has accepted the government’s arguments that the firings are part of removing bureaucratic votes, despite the explicit executive order from Trump calling for the Department of Education to be dismantled.
President Trump hailed the top court’s decision, saying it handed a “Major Victory to Parents and Students across the Country” and will allow his administration to begin the “very important process” of returning many of the department’s functions “BACK TO THE STATES”.
Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said it was a “shame” that it took the Supreme Court’s intervention to let Trump’s plan move ahead. “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,” McMahon said.
The Supreme Court’s decision cancels a previous order on the administration’s efforts to fire the workers at the Education Department, which US District Judge Myong Joun had ruled against in May, stating that it would “likely cripple the department”. A US Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling on June 4 that the cuts would make it “effectively impossible for the Department to carry out its statutory functions”, which include overseeing student loans and enforcing civil rights law in US education.
Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group representing school districts and unions, said the court’s action “dealt a devastating blow to this nation’s promise of public education for all children”. “We will aggressively pursue every legal option as this case proceeds to ensure that all children in this country have access to the public education they deserve,” said Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices dissented, saying their colleagues’ ruling presented a “grave” threat “to our Constitution’s separation of powers”. “As Congress mandated, the Department plays a vital role in this Nation’s education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year,” the three justices wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, rejected the administration’s arguments that the layoffs were merely a lawful effort to eliminate “bureaucratic bloat”. “Undeterred by … limits on executive authority, President Trump has made clear that he intends to close the department without Congress’s involvement,” she said.
She added that the relative harms to the two sides of allowing the layoffs to proceed counseled in favor of the district court injunction. “While the government will, no doubt, suffer pocketbook harms from having to pay employees that it sought to fire as the litigation proceeds, the harm to this Nation’s education system and individual students is of a far greater magnitude,” Sotomayor said.
The court’s unsigned emergency order effectively lifts a lower court’s block on the administration’s move to terminate more than 1,300 federal employees. Critics say this will gut the department’s core functions, including oversight of civil rights protections in schools, financial aid distribution, and special education services.