The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump to move forward with his plan to implement mass layoffs at the Department of Education, marking another significant victory for the White House at the conservative-leaning high court.
In an unsigned order, the justices temporarily lifted a lower court’s ruling that had blocked the plan indefinitely. The decision allows Trump’s initiative to proceed while the legal battle continues. The court’s three liberal justices dissented from the ruling, CNN reported.
In a sharp dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, stated that her colleagues had made an “indefensible” decision to allow Trump to proceed with dismantling an agency that typically can only be eliminated 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. Unable to join in this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent,” she wrote. It should be noted, however, that Trump did not order the dismantling of the Education Department, only the elimination of excess staff.
Earlier this year, Trump ordered sweeping layoffs at the Department of Education, aiming to slash the agency’s workforce by 50%. However, lower courts intervened, arguing that because the department was established by Congress, the executive branch could not unilaterally dismantle it.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, a Biden appointee, issued an indefinite injunction blocking the layoffs and ordered the administration to reinstate approximately 1,400 employees who had been terminated. The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit brought by a coalition of teachers’ unions, school districts, state governments, and education advocacy organizations.
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.
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 pledge to eliminate the Department of Education, his legal team told the Supreme Court that the current action falls short of that goal. They argued that the department will still fulfill its statutory duties but will do so with a significantly reduced staff, CNN noted.
