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Parking permits. Desk space. Access cards.
Ordered to bring back roughly 1,300 laid-off workers, the U.S. Department of Education instead has spent weeks ostensibly working on the logistics. Meanwhile, the Trump administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to decide they don’t have to restore those jobs after all.
The legal argument over the job status of Education Department workers is testing the extent to which President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon can reshape the federal bureaucracy without congressional approval.
The employees, meanwhile, remain in limbo, getting paid for jobs they aren’t allowed to perform.
An analysis done by the union representing Education Department employees estimates the government is spending about $7 million a month for workers not to work. That figure does not include supervisors who are not part of the American Federation of Government Employee Local 252.
“It is terribly inefficient,” said Brittany Coleman, chief steward for AFGE Local 252 and an attorney in the Office for Civil Rights. “The American people are not getting what they need because we can’t do our jobs.”
McMahon announced the layoffs in March, a week after she was confirmed by the Senate, and described them as a first step toward dismantling the Education Department. A few days later, Trump signed an executive order directing McMahon to do everything in her legal authority to shut down the department.
The Somerville and Easthampton school districts in Massachusetts, along with the American Federation of Teachers, other education groups, and 21 Democratic attorneys general sued McMahon over the cuts. They argued the layoffs were so extensive that the Education Department would not be able to perform its duties under the law.
The layoffs hit the Office for Civil Rights, Federal Student Aid, and the Institute of Education Sciences particularly hard. These agencies are responsible for federally mandated work within the Education Department. By law, only Congress can get rid of the Education Department.
U.S. District Court Judge Myong Joun agreed, issuing a sweeping preliminary injunction in May that ordered the Education Department to bring laid off employees back to work and blocked any further effort to dismantle or substantively restructure the department.
The Trump administration sought a stay of that order, and the case is on the emergency docket of the Supreme Court, where a decision could come any day.
In the administration’s request to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the harms the various plaintiffs had described were largely hypothetical, that they had not shown the department wasn’t fulfilling its duties, and that they didn’t have standing to sue because layoffs primarily affect department employees, not states, school districts, and education organizations.
Sauer further argued that the injunction violates the separation of powers, putting the judicial branch in charge of employment decisions that are the purview of the executive branch.
“The injunction rests on the untenable assumption that every terminated employee is necessary to perform the Department of Education’s statutory functions,” Sauer wrote in a court filing. “That injunction effectively appoints the district court to a Cabinet role and bars the Executive Branch from terminating anyone.”
The Supreme Court, with a conservative 6-3 majority, has been friendlier to the administration’s arguments than lower court judges. Already the court has allowed cuts to teacher training grants to go through while a lawsuit works its way through the courts. And it has halted the reinstatement of fired probationary workers.
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Last week, Joun issued a separate order telling the Education Department that it must reinstate employees in the Office for Civil Rights. The Victims Rights Law Center and other groups had described thousands of cases left in limbo, with children suffering severe bullying or unable to safely return to school.
Meanwhile, the Education Department continues to file weekly updates with Joun about the complexities of reinstating the laid-off employees. In these court filings, Chief of Staff Rachel Oglesby said an “ad hoc committee of senior leadership” is meeting weekly to figure out where employees might park and where they should report to work.
Since the layoffs, the department has closed regional offices, consolidated offices in three Washington, D.C. buildings into one, reduced its contracts for parking space, and discontinued an interoffice shuttle.
In the most recent filing, Oglesby said the department is working on a “reintegration plan.”
Coleman said she finds these updates “laughable.”
“If you are really willing to do what the court is telling you to do, then your working group would have figured out a way to get us our laptops,” she said.
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
