Supreme Court clears the way for Trump’s cuts to the Education Department

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court agreed on Monday that the Trump administration can proceed with dismantling the Education Department by firing more than 1,000 workers.

The order is a significant victory for the administration and could ease President Donald Trump’s efforts to sharply curtail the federal government’s role in the nation’s schools.

The Trump administration has announced plans to fire more than 1,300 workers, a move that would effectively gut the department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.

The Education Department began the year with more than 4,000 employees. The administration also fired some probationary workers and offered employees the ability to resign. Altogether, after the terminations, the Education Department will have a workforce of about half the size it did before Trump returned to office.

The move by the justices represents an expansion of presidential power, allowing Trump to functionally eliminate a government department created by Congress, without legislators’ input.

It comes after a decision by the justices last week that cleared the way for the Trump administration to move forward with cutting thousands of jobs across a number of federal agencies, including the departments of Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury.

The order by the court was unsigned and gave no reasoning, as is typical in such emergency applications. But Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by the court’s other two liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The three argued that Trump had overstepped his authority with his “unilateral efforts to eliminate a Cabinet-level agency established by Congress nearly half a century ago.”

The order is technically temporary, in effect only while courts continue to consider the legality of Trump’s move. In practice, fired workers whom a Boston judge had ordered be reinstated are now again subject to removal from their jobs.

In a statement, a union representing Education Department workers called the court’s decision “deeply disappointing.”

“This effort from the Trump administration to dismantle the Department of Education is playing with the futures of millions of Americans, and after just four months, the consequences are already evident across our education system,” Sheria Smith, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, said in the statement.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.