The Supreme Court allowed President Trump on Monday to move ahead with mass firings and deep cuts at the Education Department, setting aside a lower court’s ruling that had put the administration’s plans on hold.
In a brief order, the justices said the ruling out of a federal court in Massachusetts is stayed while the case develops further.
The result is that Mr. Trump can carry out a reduction in force and the termination of more than 100 grants.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor led the court’s three Democratic appointees in dissenting, saying Mr. Trump was trying to abolish the department on his own — and her GOP-appointed colleagues were enabling him.
“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,” she wrote.
Secretary Linda McMahon hailed Monday’s ruling as a victory for Mr. Trump’s power to run federal agencies.
“We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most — to students, parents, and teachers,” she said.
She also said her department will “continue to perform all statutory duties.”
A coalition of local school districts and left-leaning education associations had sued to stop the cuts. They said the Supreme Court ruling would allow the department to be dismantled.
“This unlawful plan will immediately and irreparably harm students, educators and communities across our nation. Children will be among those hurt the most by this decision,” the coalition said in a statement.
Shutting down the department has long been a goal of some conservatives, and Mr. Trump did issue an executive order directing his administration to carry that out to the maximum extent allowed under the law.
But his lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, had told the justices that’s not what the reductions in force were about.
He said Mr. Trump knows he can’t abolish the department on his own.
He does, however, maintain significant authority to adjust the department’s spending priorities. And the courts trampled on that with their interference, he argued.
“The Constitution vests the Executive Branch, not district courts, with the authority to make judgments about how many employees are needed to carry out an agency’s statutory functions, and whom they should be,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun, a Biden appointee who sits in Massachusetts, had issued an injunction against the cuts in May. He said Mr. Trump’s defense that he was reorganizing rather than abolishing the department were “plainly not true.”
He said the cuts were so deep that they crippled the department’s ability to carry out the duties assigned to it in law by Congress.
As an example, he focused on the Office of Civil Rights, where staff has been cut in half and 7 of 12 regional offices have been shuttered.
Judge Myong said those closures have left the OCR unable to perform the kinds of audits it’s required to do under the law. In one case, a 12-year-old who claims harassment at school has been unable to return until the OCR completes an investigation — but the probe was halted during the staff cuts.
His ruling clashed with one issued by another federal judge who found the Office of Civil Rights, while trimmed, is still able to meet the minimum activities required by the law.
Mr. Trump has argued that education decisions should be left to states, rather than imposed nationwide by an imperious federal government.
He pointed to Biden administration mandates on LGBT and diversity, equity and inclusion issues as ways the feds can go astray.
