\n<\/p>\n
Before Trump took office, the Education Department had 4,133 employees. After the mass layoffs, the department will have fewer than 2,200 staffers.<\/p>\n
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison\/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross\/Getty Images | Matveev_Aleksandr and raweenuttapong\/iStock\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon the go-ahead Monday to proceed in firing half the department\u2019s staff and transferring certain responsibilities to other agencies.<\/p>\n
The unsigned, one-paragraph order does not explain why a majority of justices decided to overturn a lower court injunction that an appeals court upheld. It did, however, explain that the injunction will remain blocked as lawsuits challenging mass layoffs at the department continue. The high court order represents a major step forward in President Donald Trump\u2019s effort to dismantle the 45-year-old agency.<\/p>\n
\u201cToday, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the President of the United States, as the head of the Executive Branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies,\u201d McMahon said in a statement about the decision. The department will now \u201cpromote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most\u2014-to students, parents, and teachers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The American Federation of Government Employees, the union representing the department\u2019s staff, said the ruling was \u201cdeeply disappointing\u201d and would allow the Trump administration to continue implementing an \u201canti-democratic\u201d plan that is \u201cmisalign[ed] with the Constitution.\u201d Sheria Smith, president of AFGE Local 252, added that just because McMahon can dismantle the department, that doesn\u2019t mean she has to.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet\u2019s be clear,\u201d Smith wrote, \u201cdespite this decision, the Department of Education has a choice\u2014a choice to recommit to providing critical services for the American people and reject political agendas. The agency doesn\u2019t have to move forward with this callous act of eliminating services and terminating dedicated workers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The original ruling from a Maryland district judge required McMahon to reinstate more than 2,000 employees who were laid off in March. (As of July\u00a08, 527 of those employees had already found other jobs.)<\/p>\n
Higher education policy advocates and laid-off staffers warned that the department was already struggling to keep up with the overload of civil rights complaints and financial aid applications. With half the workforce, they said, fulfilling those statutory duties would be nearly impossible.<\/p>\n
In addition to the layoffs, the lower court order prevented McMahon from carrying out Trump\u2019s executive order to close the department to the \u201cmaximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.\u201d Department officials later revealed in court filings that the order blocked a plan to send funding for career and technical education programs to the Department of Labor.<\/p>\n
The departments reached an agreement in May regarding the CTE programs, but neither said anything about it publicly. CTE advocates worry that putting Labor in charge of about $2.7\u00a0billion in grants could sow confusion and diminish the quality of these secondary and postsecondary career-prep programs. Others see the shift as the beginning of the end of the Education Department. Democrats in Congress have objected to the plan, which can now move forward.<\/p>\n
After news of the Supreme Court order dropped Monday, education policy experts sounded the alarm and took issue with the lack of explanation. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe president can\u2019t close down ED by fiat but Congress and SCOTUS sure can facilitate it,\u201d Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, wrote on BlueSky.<\/p>\n
Daniel Collier, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Memphis, also chimed in, asking, \u201cAm I in the minority by believing that all SCOTUS rulings should have a well detailed and written rationale attached and there should be no exceptions?\u201d<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court\u2019s order included a scathing 18-page dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan joined in full. Sotomayor noted that the department plays \u201ca vital role\u201d in the nation\u2019s education system by \u201csafeguarding equal access\u201d and allocating billions of dollars in federal funding. Knowing this, she added, \u201conly Congress has the power to abolish the department.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the judiciary\u2019s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,\u201d Sotomayor wrote. \u201cTwo lower courts rose to the occasion, preliminarily enjoining the mass firings while the litigation remains ongoing. Rather than maintain the status quo, however, this court now intervenes, lifting the injunction and permitting the government to proceed with dismantling the department. That decision is indefensible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others, however, said the Supreme Court made the right call. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere is nothing unconstitutional about the executive branch trying to execute the law with fewer people, which is what the Trump administration is doing,\u201d said Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, who also contributed an opinion piece to Inside Higher Ed<\/em> today. If the Trump administration wanted to eliminate the Department of Education unilaterally, he said, \u201cIt would have fired everyone. Not only did it not do that, but members of the administration have stated that it is ultimately Congress that must eliminate the department.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before Trump took office, the Education Department had 4,133 employees. After the mass layoffs, the department will have fewer than 2,200 staffers. Photo illustration by Justin Morrison\/Inside Higher Ed | Tierney L. Cross\/Getty Images | Matveev_Aleksandr and raweenuttapong\/iStock\/Getty Images The Supreme Court gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon the go-ahead Monday to proceed in firing half<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10895,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[200,496,4058,1472,4057],"class_list":{"0":"post-10894","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-department","9":"tag-education","10":"tag-layoffs","11":"tag-mass","12":"tag-scotus"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/10895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}