The Supreme Court has allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to carry out mass layoffs at the Department of Education, blocking a federal judge’s ruling that had previously halted them.
Monday’s unsigned order was in response to an emergency application from the Trump administration. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
This decision “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out,” Sotomayor wrote in a scathing dissent, joined by Kagan and 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.”
District Judge Myong J. Joun, nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, had originally blocked thousands of terminations to DOE employees in May, stating, “The record abundantly reveals that defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute.”
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Only Congress can shut down the department entirely, which Joun also noted in his ruling.
Shortly after taking office, Trump issued an executive order that stated the secretary of education “shall, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities while ensuring the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
This marks another legal win for the Trump administration in its quest to continue its mass firings. Earlier this month, the court cleared the way for Trump to continue his mass federal layoffs at numerous federal agencies, ruling his “workforce optimization” executive order was “likely lawful.”
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