The Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration can move ahead with its plan to fire nearly 1,400 Education Department employees, a move that critics say will cripple the agency’s ability to carry out Congressionally mandated functions and represents a clear threat to the Constitution’s separation of powers.

On Monday, July 14, the Court’s six conservative justices granted the administration’s emergency appeal, overturning a lower court’s preliminary injunction preventing the mass layoffs. Writing for the Court’s three liberal justices in her dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor warned of the decision’s “grave” implications.

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“When the Executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the Judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Sotomayor wrote.

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In March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take all necessary steps permitted by law “to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” The department’s primary functions — overseeing the national student aid program and civil rights enforcement to ensure equal access to schools and educational programs — should be “returned to the States,” Trump stated in the March 20 order.

Advocacy groups blasted Trump’s executive order for the harm it will inflict on marginalized students, including those who identify as LGBTQ+.

As NBC News notes, McMahon subsequently issued a memo ordering mass layoffs, writing that her goal was to “shut down” the Education Department. However, neither the education secretary nor the president have the authority to eliminate the department, which was established by Congress in 1979, without Congressional approval.  

In May, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun ruled in favor of plaintiffs in two consolidated lawsuits challenging Trump’s executive order. They argued that the layoffs and the administration’s plan to transfer the department’s function to other agencies amounted to an illegal closure of the Education Department, according to the Associated Press. Joun wrote that the evidence “reveals that the defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” according to NBC News.

As USA Today and other outlets note, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority did not explain its decision to overturn Joun’s ruling.

In her dissent, Sotomayor wrote that the Court’s “indefensible” decision “hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. 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.”

“Without explaining to the American people its reasoning, a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court have dealt a devastating blow to this nation’s promise of public education for all children,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represents plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement following the court’s ruling Monday. “On its shadow docket, the Court has yet again ruled to overturn the decision of two lower courts without argument.”

Lawyers for Democracy Forward had argued that if the administration was allowed to go forward with the mass layoffs while the courts decide whether it was acting legally, it would be “effectively impossible to undo much of the damage.”

According to USA Today, Perryman said that Democracy Forward would “aggressively pursue every legal option as this case proceeds to ensure that all children in this country have access to the public education they deserve.”

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