The US Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to proceed with mass layoffs at the Education Department while legal challenges continue.
The court granted the administration’s request to lift a lower court injunction that had blocked the firing of more than 2,000 department employees—roughly half the agency’s workforce. Education Secretary Linda McMahon ordered the cuts in March as part of what has been branded the department’s “final mission.”
In the order’s immediate aftermath, 20 states, the District of Columbia, and a group of school districts and unions had sued, arguing the layoffs violated constitutional separation of powers by effectively dismantling a department that only Congress can abolish.
In May, the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction, ordering the department to reinstate the fired employees and halt implementation of the reduction-in-force. Judge Myong J. Joun found that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on constitutional grounds.
In June, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit upheld the injunction, finding that the government failed to make a strong showing it would likely succeed on appeal, noting that the administration provided no evidence to counter the district court’s extensive factual findings that the reduction-in-force was “explicitly implemented to shut down the Department.”
On Monday, the Supreme Court granted the Trump administration’s emergency application to stay the preliminary injunction, allowing the Education Department layoffs to proceed while the case continues through the appeals process.
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, called the majority’s decision “indefensible” and accused the administration of seizing “the power to repeal federal law by way of mass terminations.”
The case stems from President Trump’s campaign promise to eliminate the Education Department and return authority to states, in a time of pervasive ideological tension in the US that has spurred debate about the nature of public education across the country. On his social network Truth Social, Trump lauded the decision as a “major victory.”
