The emergency application to the justices stemmed from efforts by the Trump administration to sharply curtail the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.
Credit...Eric Lee/The New York Times

Supreme Court Allows Trump to Gut Education Department With Mass Firings

The move by the justices represents an expansion of executive power, allowing President Trump to dismantle the inner workings of a government department.

by · NY Times

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday that the Trump administration can proceed with dismantling the Education Department by firing more than a thousand workers.

The order is a significant victory for the administration and could ease President Trump’s efforts to sharply curtail the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.

The Trump administration has announced plans to fire more than 1,300 workers, a move that would effectively gut the department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.

The Education Department began the year with more than 4,000 employees. The administration also fired some probationary workers and offered employees the ability to resign. Altogether, after the terminations, the Education Department will have a work force of about half the size it did before Mr. Trump returned to office.

The move by the justices represents an expansion of presidential power, allowing Mr. Trump to dismantle the inner workings of a government department created by Congress without legislators’ input. The firings will hobble much of the department’s work, supporters argued in court filings. Particularly hard hit was the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which had seven of its 12 offices shuttered.

It comes after a decision by the justices last week that cleared the way for the Trump administration to move forward with cutting thousands of jobs across a number of federal agencies, including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury.

The order by the court was unsigned and gave no reasoning, as is typical in such emergency applications. No vote count was given, which is usual for emergency orders, but Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by the court’s other two liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The three argued that Mr. Trump had overstepped his authority with his “unilateral efforts to eliminate a cabinet-level agency established by Congress nearly half a century ago.”

“Only Congress has the power to abolish the department,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in her 19-page dissent.

The court’s decision, she wrote, would have severe consequences for the country’s students by unleashing “untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”

The order is technically temporary, in effect only while courts continue to consider the legality of Mr. Trump’s move. In practice, fired workers whom a Boston judge had ordered be reinstated are now again subject to removal from their jobs.

Trump administration officials celebrated the court’s decision, with Mr. Trump himself thanking the court on social media for “a Major Victory to Parents and Students across the Country.”

A White House spokeswoman, Liz Huston, said in a statement that the court had “once again recognized what radical district court judges refuse to accept — President Trump, as head of the executive branch, has absolute constitutional authority to direct and manage its agencies and officers.”

The education secretary, Linda McMahon, said in a statement that the department would press forward with terminating workers.

“We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most — to students, parents, and teachers,” Ms. McMahon said. She added that the administration would “return education to the states,” but would “continue to perform all statutory duties” while “reducing education bureaucracy.”

Democrats and a union representing Education Department workers warned of dire consequences.

“This effort from the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education is playing with the futures of millions of Americans, and after just four months, the consequences are already evident across our education system,” Sheria Smith, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, said in a statement.

Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said on social media: “This isn’t streamlining. It’s sabotage. And it’s American kids paying the price.”

Mr. Trump had signed an executive order on March 20 instructing Ms. McMahon to start shutting down the federal agency, which manages federal loans for college, monitors student achievement and supports programs for students with disabilities. Trump administration officials cited low test scores by students as the reason to dismantle the department.

“We’re going to shut it down, and shut it down as quickly as possible,” Mr. Trump said during the ceremony where he signed the executive order.

The move immediately set up a legal fight over the future of the department because it was created by an act of Congress, and legislators had not given approval to eliminate it.

Shortly after, two school districts, the American Federation of Teachers and 21 Democratic state attorneys general filed a legal challenge in federal court in Massachusetts. The challengers asked a judge to block the executive order and to unwind a round of layoffs that gutted the department’s work force by about half.

Lawyers for the challengers argued that the administration’s plans would interfere with the department’s ability to carry out functions required by law.

On May 22, Judge Myong J. Joun of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the fired employees while the lawsuit was pending. Judge Joun, who was nominated to the bench by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said he agreed that only Congress could eliminate the department and that the administration’s actions amounted to an illegal shutdown of the agency.

On June 4, a panel of judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld Judge Joun’s ruling. Two days later, the Trump administration filed an emergency application with the Supreme Court, asking it to intervene and lift the trial judge’s order. In the filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that Judge Joun had “thwarted the executive branch’s authority to manage the Department of Education.”

In response, lawyers for the challengers argued that the agency’s leaders had “set out to destroy the agency by executive fiat” and without the support of Congress.

In court filings, the challengers asserted that the trial judge had properly determined that the government was likely to lose its argument that it had not eliminated the department. Judge Joun properly recognized that just because “a skeleton crew remains” at the Education Department, that did not mean the Trump administration was “faithfully carrying out Congress’s mission” in what was effectively “tearing the department down to the plywood,” they argued.

The Trump administration replied in court filings that the department had “determined that it can carry out its statutorily mandated functions with a pared-down staff and that many discretionary functions are better left to the states.”

Michael C. Bender contributed reporting.

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