SupCo lets Trump take sledgehammer to Ed Department, for now
Kelsey Reichmann
WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court on Monday granted President Donald Trump’s bid to halt pay for 1,400 Education Department employees while his administration pushes forward with plans to dismantle the agency amid a legal showdown with Democratic states.
In an apparent 6-3 decision, the high court sided with Trump in the now-familiar fight between executive authority and judicial branch oversight, this time in the context of job cuts at the Education Department.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor led the three liberal justices in dissent, calling the decision indefensible. The Barack Obama appointee said the high court had allowed Trump to usurp congressional authority by firing the employees necessary to carry out democratically passed laws.
“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.
Sotomayor said her colleagues had misused the emergency docket and warned that allowing Trump to dismantle the Education Department would have grave consequences.
“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,” Sotomayor wrote.
Trump slashed the department’s staff by half in March, spurring a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James and 20 other states’ attorneys general. A federal judge blocked the cuts after James said the massive cuts would strip necessary services, resources and funding from students and families.
U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer said the preliminary injunction in this case “epitomize[d] many of the same errors in recent district-court injunctions usurping control of the federal workforce.”
Trump fired 1,378 employees from the department through reduction-in-force notices — a hallmark of the administration’s campaign against waste and fraud in the federal government.
New York stated that the massive workforce cuts rendered statutorily mandated functions of the department incapacitated. The state said this includes almost all of the staff who review the certification and recertification of higher education institutions for federal student aid.
“Petitioners have failed to explain how the Department can continue to perform timely certification reviews with no staff, and disruptions in federal certification have already interfered with the ability of public colleges and universities to meet enrollment goals and provide academic programs,” the states wrote.
The states argue that workforce cuts are already harming public education, with missed funding deadlines from the Department of Education disrupting state budgets for the upcoming school year. While they acknowledge the executive branch’s authority to impose staff reductions, they maintain that only Congress has the power to dismantle federal agencies or terminate their functions.
The administration argued that the states’ lawsuit wasn’t the appropriate vehicle to challenge employee terminations, asserting that under the Civil Service Reform Act, only the affected employees—not states, districts, or unions—can seek reinstatement. Trump said the statute prevented the lower court from issuing relief to all 1,400 employees.
The administration argued that the lower court injunction rested on the assumption that every terminated employee is necessary to perform the Education Department’s statutory functions.
“This court’s intervention is essential to halt such perverse results and the one-way litigation ratchet,” Sauer wrote. “Numerous courts in recent months and years have concluded that similar federal-employment suits are precluded.”
Congress created the Education Department so only Congress can abolish it, Sotomayor wrote. She said Trump’s executive order unquestionable exceeded Congress’ statutory limits on executive authority.
The liberal justices chastised their colleagues for allowing Trump to unlawfully seize power, especially considering the potential harm to education. Sotomayor said the high court’s decision would unleash untold harm by curtailing resources that Congress intended.
“The majority apparently deems it more important to free the government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues,” Sotomayor wrote. “Equity does not support such an inequitable result.”
Sotomayor said Trump had a responsibility to take care that the laws were faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them.
“That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers,” Sotomayor wrote. “Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief. Because I cannot condone such abuse of our equitable authority, I respectfully dissent.”