Court blocks Trump’s plan to dismantle education department

Boston — A federal judge blocked US President Donald Trump’s administration from carrying out his executive order to dismantle the department of education and ordered it to reinstate employees terminated in a mass layoff.

District Judge Myong Joun at the behest of a group of Democratic-led states, school districts and teachers’ unions issued an injunction blocking the department from terminating more than 1,300 employees, which would cut its staff by half.

“The record abundantly reveals that the defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorising statute,” wrote Joun, who was appointed by Joe Biden, Trump’s predecessor.

Lawyers with the justice department argued the mass terminations were not an effort to shut the agency but a lawful effort to eliminate bureaucratic bloat while fulfilling its overall statutory mission more efficiently.

Joun said the cuts were having the opposite effect; the “massive reduction in staff has made it effectively impossible for the department to carry out its statutorily mandated functions.”

“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,” the judge wrote.

He ordered the administration to not just reinstate the workers but also to halt implementation of Trump’s March 21 directive to transfer student loans and special needs programmes to other federal agencies.

Education department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said in a statement that the Trump administration would immediately challenge the ruling, which she said came from “an unelected judge with a political axe to grind”.

Skye Perryman, whose liberal legal group Democracy Forward represented the school districts and unions, said Thursday’s ruling means “disastrous mass firings of career civil servants are blocked while this wildly disruptive and unlawful agency action is litigated”.

The department, which Congress created in 1979, oversees $1.6-trillion in college loans, enforces civil rights laws in schools and provides federal funding for needy districts.

‘Final mission’

Secretary of education Linda McMahon announced the mass layoff, known in government parlance as a “reduction in force”, on March 11, which her agency said was being carried out as part of the department’s “final mission”.

Those job cuts were announced a week before Trump signed an executive order calling for the department’s closure after a campaign promise to conservatives aimed at leaving school policy almost entirely in the hands of states and local boards.

In combination with 600 employees who took termination packages, the education department said the job cuts once implemented would leave it with 2,183 workers, down from 4,133 when Trump took office on January 20.

In an interview at the time with Fox News, McMahon said Trump’s “directive to me, clearly, is to shut down the department of education”. She said that while Congress would be needed to close it, the layoffs were “the first step of eliminating what I think is bureaucratic bloat.”

Democratic attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia as well as school districts and teachers’ unions then sued, saying the cuts rendered the department unable to meet its duties of administering funding for schools and college student loans and enforcing civil rights law.

Reuters