Federal Judge Blocks Trump Executive Order to Dismantle Education Department

President Donald Trump’s sweeping deregulatory agenda was dealt a blow on Thursday when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction to block Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and ordered reinstatements of laid off workers.

Massachusetts federal Judge Myong Joun wrote in an order that the administration has provided no evidence to back its arguments that they are simply seeking to make the department more efficient by conducting mass layoffs.

Meanwhile, Joun reaffirmed that only Congress can formally abolish the Education Department, and said that the department has not backed up its claim that it is working with Congress to do so.

“Not only is there no evidence that Defendants are pursuing a ‘legislative goal’ or otherwise working with Congress to reach a resolution, but there is also no evidence that the [reduction in force] has actually made the Department more efficient,” Joun wrote.

“Rather, the record is replete with evidence of the opposite,” he said. He wrote that Trump’s efforts to lay off more than half of the agency’s workers, amounting to hundreds of employees, have only made it more difficult for the agency to carry out its tasks.

Joun ordered the reinstatement of all workers who have been laid off.

“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all. 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 order said.

The ruling came as a result of two lawsuits, one brought by a group of educators, labor unions, and other groups in Massachusetts and another filed by 21 Democratic attorneys general in March. The Democrats said that the Trump administration’s dismantling of the Education Department is not about efficiency, but is clearly another attack on public resources and funding for children and families across the U.S.

In mid-March, the Trump administration said it was planning mass layoffs to cut the department’s 4,100-person workforce by half.

He pointed out that the administration has especially targeted the Education Department’s civil rights office, making cuts to cause “irreparable harm that will result from financial uncertainty and delay, impeded access to vital knowledge on which students and educators rely, and loss of essential services for America’s most vulnerable student populations.”

Plaintiffs celebrated the decision, saying it is a crucial stopgap in the fight against Trump’s attacks on the education system.

“Today’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,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which brought the lawsuit on behalf of the group of educators. “No one’s lives are being made better by this administration’s attempted dismantling of the Department of Education.”