Trump puts Education Department demolition before SCOTUS

WASHINGTON (CN) — President Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court for help dismantling the Department of Education on Friday, pushing the justices to keep nearly 1,400 employees off the government’s payroll despite an unresolved legal dispute.

Trump slashed the department’s staff by half in March, spurring a lawsuit from New York Attorney General Letitia James and 20 other states’ attorneys general. A federal judge blocked the cuts after James said the massive cuts would strip necessary services, resources and funding from students and families.

Similar to the 18 other emergency appeals he’s filed this term, Trump argued that the lower court overstepped its authority by second-guessing the executive’s management of the Education Department.

“Intervention is again warranted,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the administration’s emergency appeal.

“That preliminary injunction epitomizes many of the same errors in recent district-court injunctions usurping control of the federal workforce,” Sauer wrote.

Mass layoffs at the department stem from the administration’s targeting of waste and fraud. The Trump administration issued a reduction-in-force notice for the agency in March, cutting 1,378 employees from the agency’s 4,133 workers.

Trump claimed that the Civil Service Reform Act prevented the lower court from issuing relief to all 1,400 employees. Under the law, employees must seek reinstatement, not states, school districts or teachers’ unions.

“Strangers to the employment relationship should not be able to leapfrog that process and leverage federal-court injunctions to force mass reinstatements,” Sauer wrote.

The administration argued that the lower court injunction rested on the assumption that every terminated employee is necessary to perform the Education Department’s statutory functions.

“This court’s intervention is essential to halt such perverse results and the one-way litigation ratchet,” Sauer wrote. “Numerous courts in recent months and years have concluded that similar federal-employment suits are precluded.”

New York disagreed with Trump’s assessment, claiming that the massive cuts essentially incapacitated statutorily mandated functions of the department. While the states say the executive branch has the authority to impose reductions in force, they claim the Trump administration doesn’t have the authority to override Congress’s exclusive authority to abolish executive agencies or discontinue their functions.

“Nothing in the numerous statutes creating the department and describing its mandated functions can be construed as authorizing the executive to gut an agency such that it can no longer meet its statutory obligations,” the states said.

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