Supreme Court green lights Education Department layoffs

By Caroline Boda
The Center Square

The U.S. Supreme Court is allowing President Donald Trump to move forward with broad layoffs within the Department of Education as a part of his campaign promise to reduce the size and cost of the federal government.

Voting along ideological lines Monday, the court granted an emergency application filed by the Trump administration to override a federal judge’s ruling that halted the mass layoffs.

After taking office in January, Trump set in motion plans to cut nearly half of the Education Department and reassign the department’s duties to other federal agencies. The president signed an executive order on Mar. 20 instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to "facilitate the closure of the Department of Education."

Trump said that shutting the department’s doors would give “children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them.”

The Trump administration’s plans were paused in May, however, when a U.S. district judge ruled that congressional approval was necessary before the administration could carry out the planned layoffs. The judge cited Congress’ establishment of the Department of Education in 1979.

The Supreme Court’s ruling Monday reverses the lower court’s injunction and allows for McMahon to proceed in firing an estimated 1,400 federal employees. 

As is common with emergency cases, the conservative justices did not expound on their majority decision.

But in a blunt dissenting opinion, the court’s three liberal justices called Monday’s ruling “indefensible” and said that the Supreme Court is “expediting” the executive branch’s intent to break the law.

“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,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote.

The justices' ruling is not a final decision, and the issue could return to the nation’s top court at a later time.