Supreme Court Greenlights Trump’s Education Department Layoffs

The Supreme Court decided Monday that President Donald Trump can go ahead with dismantling the Education Department in the latest victory for the administration at the high court.

The court voted 6-3 along ideological lines to block a federal judge’s order to reinstate about 1,400 employees who were fired in mass layoffs at the Education Department earlier this year.

In March, Trump signed an executive order dismantling the Department of Education, following through on a key campaign promise to strengthen parental rights and improve academic outcomes across the country.

Also that month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon laid off about half of her department’s workforce.

The administration was hit with two lawsuits, one filed by a pair of Massachusetts school districts and the American Federation of Teachers union, and the other filed by 21 Democratic attorneys general.

In May, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Boston blocked the administration’s order and said the fired employees must be allowed to return to work.

His ruling is now on hold while the legal challenge continues, but the administration is cleared to proceed with the layoffs for now.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent accusing the conservative justices of making an “indefensible” decision, arguing that Trump is trying to illegally shutter the department without congressional approval.

To eliminate the Department of Education outright, Trump would need an act of Congress, but his executive order dismantles the department as much as possible in the meantime.

“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Sotomayor wrote.

“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,” the liberal justice wrote.

The other two liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, joined Sotomayor’s dissent.

“Everybody knows it’s right. The Democrats know it’s right,” Trump said just before signing the order. “We’re going to be returning education, very simply, back to the states where it belongs, and this is a very popular thing to do, but much more importantly, it’s a common sense thing to do, and it’s going to work. Absolutely, it’s going to work.”

Critics have pointed out that the Education Department doesn’t do much educating. Though it spends $80 billion in taxpayer dollars each year, it has no say over public school curriculums, which are decided at the state and local levels. Instead, it doles out $18.4 billion annually for Title I, the low-income school district program, and $15.5 billion for special education. It also enforces certain Title IX civil rights laws and sets the rules for colleges to participate in the $1.6 trillion federal student loan program.

Under the Trump administration, the Education Department also terminated over $600 million in grants for training teachers in “divisive ideologies” including social justice activism, anti-racism, and recruiting teachers based on race.

Frustration with public schools reached a boiling point over the last several years. During the pandemic, parents pleaded with schools to open the classrooms and stop requiring face masks on children. After COVID, parents complained of crippling learning loss, schools hiding children’s gender identity changes, and teachers pushing controversial ideologies like Critical Race Theory.