Washington — President Trump’s administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to clear the way for it to continue with its efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and lay off more than 1,300 employees while a legal fight over the future of the department moves forward.
The Justice Department is seeking the high court’s intervention in a pair of disputes brought by a group of 20 states, school districts and teachers unions, which challenge Mr. Trump’s plans to unwind the Department of Education. The president signed an executive order in March directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to facilitate the department’s closure to the maximum extent allowed under the law.
As part of Mr. Trump’s pledge to get rid of the department, the administration canceled a host of grants and executed a reduction in force, or a layoff, that impacted 1,378 employees — roughly a third of the department’s workforce. Affected workers were placed on administrative leave and were to receive full pay and benefits until June 9.
Mr. Trump also announced that the Small Business Administration would take over the Education Department’s student-loan portfolio, and the Department of Health and Human Services would handle special education, nutrition and other related services.
In response to the lawsuits challenging Mr. Trump’s actions, a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the administration from carrying out its layoffs, finding that the reduction-in-force was a unilateral effort to close the department, which would violate the separation of powers.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, appointed by former President Joe Biden, ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the nearly 1,400 employees to their role. A reduction-in-force “of this magnitude will likely cripple the department,” he said.
Joun wrote in his decision that while the Trump administration acknowledged that the Department of Education cannot be shuttered without congressional approval, there was no evidence demonstrating that the administration is working with Congress to reach a resolution.
The Justice Department asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit to pause the lower court’s decision, which it declined to do earlier this week.
In seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the district court in Massachusetts “thwarted the executive branch’s authority to manage the Department of Education despite lacking jurisdiction to second-guess the Executive’s internal management decisions.”
“The Constitution vests the executive branch, not district courts, with the authority to make judgments about how many employees are needed to carry out an agency’s statutory functions, and whom they should be,” Sauer wrote.
He said that the layoffs are part of the Trump administration’s “policy of streamlining the department and eliminating discretionary functions that, in the administration’s view, are better left to the states.”
The Supreme Court has already intervened in one other legal battle over the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the Department of Education, which stemmed from a different order from Joun involving funding that supports teacher recruitment and training. In April, the high court divided 5-4 to let the government cancel millions of dollars in education grants that purportedly funded programs that involved diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Mr. Trump’s administration has attempted to drastically slash the size of the federal workforce as part of the president’s plans to overhaul the government. Separate from the layoffs at the Department of Education, other agencies have also sought to initiate large-scale reductions-in-force.
But a judge in San Francisco issued a preliminary injunction last month that prevented the Trump administration from moving forward with its existing reductions-in-force or planning any future layoffs as directed by Mr. Trump.
The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to lift that order and allow the government to continue with the planned workforce reductions, though the request for emergency relief is still pending.