The Supreme Court has given Donald Trump the green light to move forward with massive layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education — a decision that drew a blistering rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
In a short, unsigned order released Monday, the conservative-majority court paused a lower court ruling that had blocked Trump’s plan. That ruling had stopped the administration from firing over a thousand Education Department workers while legal challenges unfolded.
Justice Sotomayor called the decision “indefensible” as she slammed the court for letting Trump gut a federal agency created by Congress.
“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,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was backed by the court’s two other liberal justices.
Trump’s plan — announced earlier this year — would slash the department’s workforce by half. A federal judge had blocked the move, saying only Congress has the power to dismantle the agency. But Monday’s Supreme Court ruling clears the way for the cuts to start immediately.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, who was appointed by President Biden, had called Trump’s actions illegal and dangerous. “The record abundantly reveals that defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” he wrote.
Judge Joun ordered the administration to reinstate about 1,400 fired employees, saying the layoffs would “likely cripple” the department.
But Education Secretary Linda McMahon praised the Supreme Court’s intervention.
“This is a significant win for students and families,” she said in a statement. “We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most.”
McMahon added that the administration would keep fulfilling its legal duties while cutting “education bureaucracy.”
The Education Department, created under President Jimmy Carter, oversees federal aid to schools and students and enforces civil rights laws in education — including protections for students with disabilities and victims of discrimination.
Trump, who has long pushed to eliminate the department, claims the layoffs are just a matter of “internal management” and that core responsibilities will still be handled — just by fewer people.
Sotomayor wasn’t buying it.
“The record unambiguously refutes that account,” she wrote. “Neither the President nor Secretary McMahon made any secret of their intent to ignore their constitutional duties.”
She pointed to Trump’s repeated calls to abolish the department, both on the campaign trail and after taking office. “Rather than wait for legislative action to begin shuttering the Department, McMahon slashed the agency’s work force in half, concededly without analyzing the effect of those terminations on the Department’s statutorily mandated functions,” she wrote.
Sotomayor warned the decision would “unleash untold harm,” putting vulnerable students at risk.
It will delay or block access to education, she wrote, and leave children “to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”
In her closing, Sotomayor said the court prioritized saving money over protecting students: “The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fire than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues.”
