A highly divided US Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that mandated the restoration of up to 1,400 employees, allowing President Donald Trump to continue dismantling the Department of Education.
The conservative majority of the court on Monday granted the administration’s emergency plea, rescinding a decision that claimed the Trump purge would prevent the department from carrying out its legal obligations under US law. The unexplained Supreme Court order will be in effect while the case is being appealed.
Three liberals on the court dissented. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the group, denounced the ruling as “indefensible” and accused the president of having “the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out.”
Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, stated, “The majority is either naive or willfully blind to the implications of its ruling, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”
The decision upholds the Supreme Court’s verdict from last week, which allowed Trump to proceed in general with his plan to drastically cut the size of the federal workforce. The legality of individual agency plans was not addressed in the July 8 order, and the most recent decision may help the administration in its defense against legal challenges to those moves.
“Today, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious,” said Education Secretary Linda McMahon in a statement sent by email. “The president of the United States, as the head of the executive branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies.”
Closing of the Department
On March 11th, McMahon declared that the department was reducing its force by half. Then, on March 20, Trump issued an executive order directing McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education, to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
Two lawsuits are challenging the attempt, one filed by various Massachusetts public school systems and unions and the other mainly by Democratic-led states.
“A majority of justices on the US Supreme Court have dealt a devastating blow to this nation’s promise of public education for all children without explaining to the American people its reasoning,” stated Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, an organization that advocates for the unions and schools.
Requests for comment were not immediately answered by the coalition of states’ attorney general’s office in New York.
In May, Boston-based US District Judge Myong Joun declared that the department will “likely be crippled” by the staff reductions. By firing its staff, closing regional offices, and transferring programs to other federal agencies, he said the challengers would likely be successful in demonstrating that Trump was essentially dismantling the department.
A department isn’t a department at all if it doesn’t have enough staff to carry out its legally required duties, Joun stated. “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.”
Trump’s plea to the Supreme Court was granted after the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals declined to overturn Joun’s decision.
The lawsuit is the most recent to deal with Trump’s power to abolish organizations established by Congress, such as the US Institute of Peace, the US Agency for International Development, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
