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A federal judge on Thursday issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the U.S. Department of Education and said the agency must reinstate the employees who were fired as part of mass layoffs.
After U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the agency’s plans in March to slash its workforce by roughly half, she called it a first step in getting rid of the agency. Trump followed days later with his executive order aiming to eliminate the department, a move he has long wanted.
But only Congress can actually eliminate the department, and the administration’s attempt at getting around that influenced U.S. District Judge Myong Joun’s Thursday ruling.
The Trump administration argued that they implemented agency layoffs to improve “efficiency” and “accountability,” the Massachusetts judge wrote, but then said: “The record abundantly reveals that [the administration’s] true intention is to effectively dismantle the Department without an authorizing statute.”
Joun added: “A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all. This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department’s employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself.”
Within hours of the Joun’s ruling, the Trump administration filed an appeal.
“This ruling is not in the best interest of American students or families,” Madi Biedermann, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Communications, wrote in a statement.
Calls for the injunction came from lawsuits filed by the Somerville and Easthampton schools districts in Massachusetts along with the American Federation of Teachers, other education groups, and 21 Democratic attorneys general.
They argued that the gutting of the department rendered the agency incapable of performing many of its core functions required by Congress.
For example, all of the attorneys from the agency’s general counsel office who handle grants for K-12 schools and grants under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, had been fired. The dismantling of the Office for Civil Rights made it difficult to enforce civil rights protections. The department’s Financial Student Aid programs, which provide financial assistance to almost 12.9 million students across approximately 6,100 postsecondary educational institutions, were also hampered.
Trump’s executive order instructed McMahon to “take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education and return authority over education to the States and local communities” to the “maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
At the same time, the order said McMahon should ensure “the effective and uninterrupted delivery of services, programs, and benefits on which Americans rely.”
Trump said he would move the agency’s student loan portfolio to the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services would replace the Education Department’s role in “handling special needs.”
Before the layoffs, the Education Department was the smallest of the 15 cabinet-level departments in terms of staffing, according to the judge, with around 4,100 employees. And the plaintiffs said the agency was strained meeting its obligations even then.
The ruling was not based on the employees’ job rights, but rather how the agency was able to fulfill its obligations.
“It’s not about whether employees have a right to a job,” said Derek Black, a University of South Carolina law professor. “It’s about whether the department can fulfill its statutory obligations to the states and to students.”
The case made by former department employees, educational institutions, unions, and educators, Joun wrote, paints “stark picture of the irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten heralded the judge’s ruling, calling it “a first step to reverse this war on knowledge and the undermining of broad-based opportunity.”
But Biedermann, from the Education Department, said the ruling was unfair to the Trump administration.
“Once again, a far-left Judge has dramatically overstepped his authority, based on a complaint from biased plaintiffs, and issued an injunction against the obviously lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional for the American people,” she said in a statement.
Chalkbeat national editor Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.
Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy atazimmer@chalkbeat.org.
