Posted on 07/14/25
| News Source: KTVZ21
The Supreme Court on Monday said President Donald Trump may proceed with his plan to carry out mass layoffs at the Department of Education in the latest win for the White House at the conservative high court.
In an unsigned order, the justices lifted for now a lower-court ruling that had indefinitely paused Trump’s plan. The Supreme Court’s decision puts that ruling on hold while the legal challenge plays out.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, said her colleagues had made an “indefensible” decision to let Trump proceed with taking apart an agency that ordinarily can only be dismantled by Congress.
“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. Unable to join in this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent,” she wrote.
Trump ordered mass layoffs at the department earlier this year – cutting its workforce in half – but lower courts have blocked that effort, noting that the Education Department was created by Congress.
US District Judge Myong Joun, nominated to the bench by former President Joe Biden, indefinitely halted Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency and ordered the administration to reinstate about 1,400 employees who had been fired en masse. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a teachers’ union, school districts, states and education groups.
Noting that the department “cannot be shut down without Congress’s approval,” Joun said Trump’s planned layoffs “will likely cripple” it. “The record abundantly reveals that defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” he wrote.
The Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously declined to reverse that order in early June and Trump appealed.
In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration countered that its effort at the Education Department involves “internal management decisions” and “eliminating discretionary functions that, in the administration’s view, are better left to the states.”
Despite Trump’s campaign-trail promises to eliminate the department entirely, his lawyers told the Supreme Court that wasn’t what is happening in this case. Instead, they said, the department could continue to carry out its legally obligated functions – just with far fewer employees.
The Education Department, created during the Carter administration, is tasked with distributing federal aid to schools, managing federal aid for college students and ensuring compliance with civil rights laws – including ensuring schools accommodate students with disabilities. Most public-school policies are a function of state government.