Judge blocks Trump’s plan to dismantle Education Department

REUTERS/KENT NISHIMURA

Demonstrators attend a Defend Our Schools rally to protest President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the Department of Education outside its building in Washington, D.C., on March 21.

BOSTON >> A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from carrying out his executive order to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and ordered it today to reinstate employees terminated in a mass layoff.

U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston, at the behest of a group of Democratic-led states, school districts and teachers’ unions, issued an injunction blocking the department from moving forward with a mass termination announced in March of over 1,300 employees, which would cut its staff by half.

“The record abundantly reveals that defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” wrote Joun, an appointee of Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.

Lawyers with the Justice Department argued that the mass terminations were not an effort to shutter the agency but a lawful effort to eliminate bureaucratic bloat while fulfilling its overall statutory mission more efficiently.

But Joun said the cuts were having the opposite effect, as the “massive reduction in staff has made it effectively impossible for the department to carry out its statutorily mandated functions.”

“This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the department becomes a shell of itself,” the judge wrote.

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He ordered the administration not just to reinstate the workers but also to halt implementation of Trump’s March 21 directive to transfer student loans and special needs programs to other federal agencies.

Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said in a statement that the Trump administration would immediately challenge the ruling, which she said came from “an unelected judge with a political axe to grind.”

Skye Perryman, whose liberal legal group Democracy Forward represented the school districts and unions, said Thursday’s ruling means “disastrous mass firings of career civil servants are blocked while this wildly disruptive and unlawful agency action is litigated.”

The department, which Congress created in 1979, oversees $1.6 trillion in college loans, enforces civil rights laws in schools and provides federal funding for needy districts.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon announced the mass layoff, known in government parlance as a “reduction in force,” on March 11, which her agency said was being carried out as part of the Education Department’s “final mission.”

Those job cuts were announced a week before Trump signed an executive order calling for the department’s closure, following a campaign promise to conservatives aimed at leaving school policy almost entirely in the hands of states and local boards.

In combination with 600 employees who took buy-out offers, the Education Department said the job cuts once implemented would leave it with 2,183 workers, down from 4,133 when Trump took office on January 20.

In an interview at the time with Fox News, McMahon said Trump’s “directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the Department of Education.” She said that while Congress would be needed to close it, the layoffs were “the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.”

Democratic attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia as well as school districts and teachers’ unions then sued, saying the cuts rendered the department unable to meet its duties of administering funding for schools and college student loans and enforcing civil rights law.

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