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A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s administration from dismantling the Department of Education and ordered the reinstatement of fired employees.
Massachusetts District Judge Myong Joun rejected the administration’s arguments that thousands of workers purged from the agency were done with “efficiency” in mind.
Mass firings have instead led to chaos and disruptions for schools, teachers, students and families across the country, according to Joun, who was appointed to the bench by former president Joe Biden.
The administration has admitted that the Education Department “cannot be shut down” without Congress weighing in, “yet they simultaneously claim that their legislative goals (obtaining Congressional approval to shut down the Department) are distinct from their administrative goals (improving efficiency),” Joun wrote in his 88-page opinion Thursday. “There is nothing in the record to support these contradictory positions.”
Instead, the administration’s “true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” he wrote. “The idea that Defendants’ actions are merely a ‘reorganization’ is plainly not true.”
Joun’s preliminary injunction orders the administration to return the Education Department to the “status quo” before his executive order designed to shutter the agency, which oversees grant funding and civil rights enforcement.
It does not have any role in developing curriculum, enrollment requirements, lesson plans or hiring at public schools, colleges or universities, but the department has become a target for Republican officials and right-wing special interest groups in an effort to purge ideological opponents from public education and privatize schools.
Joun’s order also blocks the administration from transferring the department’s functions to other agencies.
“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” the judge wrote. “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.”
Nearly 2,000 Education Department staffers were fired under Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency efforts to slash spending and purge the federal workforce.
That’s roughly half of the staff for the entire agency.
In a statement supporting the drastic cuts in March, Trump’s Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the firings uphold the administration’s “commitment to efficiency, accountability and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents and teachers.”
During her testimony to a House committee on Wednesday, McMahon was accused of “unlawfully freezing and stealing congressionally appropriated funds” by overseeing the administration’s “reckless” cuts to the department.
“You will continue to lose these battles in court,” Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told McMahon.
Thursday’s order “means that the Trump administration’s disastrous mass firings of career civil servants are blocked while this wildly disruptive and unlawful agency action is litigated,” according to Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, which represents a group of educators, school districts and unions that sued the administration to stop Trump’s attempt to shut down the department.
“No one’s lives are being made better by this administration’s attempted dismantling of the Department of Education,” Perryman said. “Instead of taking a wrecking ball to our nation’s best values and our chance at a better future, this administration should be focused on how to improve education and opportunities for all.”
