Updated: This story has been updated to include that the Trump administration appealed the order, and adds comment from the Education Department’s staff union president.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the U.S. Department of Education to reinstate the hundreds of employees it has terminated in recent months as part of a Trump administration effort to downsize the federal agency. In his order, the judge also halted enforcement of the president’s March 20 executive order seeking to abolish the department altogether.
Judge Myong Joun’s order seeks to undo all the department actions taken since Donald Trump’s inauguration to reduce the footprint of the 45-year-old agency, which has cut its staff from more than 4,000 to fewer than 2,200 since late January. The reduction in force, the bulk of which came in March, cut deeply into nearly every agency office and represented a “first step” to dismantling the department altogether, U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has said.
Joun also blocked the department from transferring any of its responsibilities to other federal agencies, as Trump has previously said he would do.
It’s a win for department staff, Democratic officials, and teachers’ unions, which have all decried Trump’s aggressive moves to shutter the agency. But the administration has been reticent to follow through on similar orders that sought to reverse deep cuts and has already moved to appeal the decision, leaving some staff skeptical that the department will follow through.
Joun, who is based in Massachusetts, found that the plaintiffs—a coalition of Democratic state officials, the nation’s second largest teachers’ union, and a handful of Massachusetts school districts—who filed two separate lawsuits challenging the staff reductions and executive order would likely succeed in court in showing that the Trump administration is “effectively disabling the department from carrying out its statutory duties by firing half of its staff, transferring key programs out of the Department, and eliminating entire offices and programs.”
The American Federation of Teachers, one of the plaintiffs in the suit, hailed the decision, with union president Randi Weingarten calling it “a first step to reverse this war on knowledge and the undermining of broad-based opportunity.”
The Education Department filed an appeal hours after the decision came down.
Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann argued the court’s order was not in the “best interest of American students or families.”
“Once again, a far-left judge has dramatically overstepped his authority, based on a complaint from biased plaintiffs, and issued an injunction against the obviously lawful efforts to make the Department of Education more efficient and functional for the American people,” she said.
Education Department reductions have faced numerous legal challenges
The order from Joun is among two from judges this week to weigh in on the agency’s seismic reduction in force.
A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Wednesday declined to reverse significant cuts to the Education Department’s office for civil rights in a different case. Joun’s order, however, would reinstate personnel for that office.
The reduction in force—which combined layoffs, the firing of probationary employees, and multiple buyout offers—came about a week before Trump signed an executive order calling on McMahon to “facilitate” the dismantling of the department “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law.”
The order itself didn’t have an immediate effect, but it made good on a promise Trump repeatedly made on the campaign trail and floated during his first term.
The plaintiffs in the broader lawsuit last month argued before Joun, an appointee of President Joe Biden, that the Trump administration’s efforts overstep Congress’ authority, saying the agency could not carry out its congressionally required mandates with the leaner staff—harming its ability to investigate civil rights violations, collect and disseminate data to inform academic progress, disburse loans to college students, and more.
The president’s remarks calling for McMahon to “put herself out of a job” and saying he would be “returning education to the states,” alongside the mass reduction in force, showed he planned to effectively dismantle the agency even without Congress’ necessary approval, they argued.
Lawyers representing the Trump administration said the president’s ultimate goal of eliminating the department was separate from the staff reductions, which they said were intended to make the department more efficient.
But Joun wasn’t swayed by that argument, saying that the administration has “not attempted to demonstrate that cutting a certain program in half has somehow made that program more efficient or returned necessary resources to the states.”
“There is no indication that defendants conducted any research to support why certain employees were terminated under the RIF over others, why certain offices were reduced or eliminated, or how any of those decisions further defendants’ purported goals of efficiency or effectiveness of the department,” Joun wrote.
In addition, the department’s actions “cannot be fairly categorized as mere managerial or staffing decisions that are typically afforded discretion,” he said in the opinion.
Sheria Smith, president of the union that represents Education Department staff, said employees were looking forward to returning to work.
“Our members built careers within the Department of Education because we love this work and want to help American families and students access the best resources at hand to succeed,” said Smith, who was among those laid off, in a statement.
Under Joun’s order, the department is to reach out to terminated staff in the next day.
Rachel Gittleman, who helped answer loan borrower complaints in the department’s federal student aid office, said she had nearly 300 complaints open when she was let go in March. There was a lot of grief in the weeks that came, she said.
Gittleman called the ruling a “huge win.”
But in some ways, she said, immeasurable damage has already been done: Some staff accepted buyouts and early retirement, and won’t be restored under this order. Others, who had their lives upended by the department’s reductions, intend to move on after such uncertainty.
“It is still an incredibly broad rebuke of what is happening to the department,” Gittleman said. “But at the end of the day, you can’t deny the fact that we’ve lost a ton of institutional and operational and programmatic and regulatory knowledge, and expertise and experience that is going to take a really long time to rebuild.”
A judge denying a request to restore OCR staffing had a different view
Joun’s decision runs contrary to that of District Judge Paul Friedman, who on Wednesday denied a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit that sought to reverse significant staffing cuts at the Education Department’s office for civil rights, which parents had argued was disrupting investigations into their anti-discrimination complaints and all but immobilizing the office.
The lawsuit also challenged the closure of seven of OCR’s 12 regional offices.
Friedman, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, said in his opinion that the plaintiffs who filed that lawsuit had failed to show that they’d likely succeed in arguing their full case.
Plaintiffs, he wrote, did not have “sufficient evidence” that OCR was failing to perform its duties now or that it would fail to do so in the future. He pointed out that several plaintiffs had civil rights complaints pending with OCR for years before the Trump administration took office in January.
The argument that the parents were harmed because of the administration’s actions fails “at the most fundamental level,” Friedman wrote.
“OCR is in fact investigating civil rights complaints despite the regional office closures and the reduction in force—albeit now likely at a much slower pace,” he continued.
The Trump administration argued that the parents and others behind this lawsuit sought to put OCR into “receivership.” Friedman wasn’t convinced that the court needed to intervene to this extent in a federal agency’s personnel decisions.
But Joun disagreed in his opinion, arguing that states, school districts, and the teachers’ union can’t rely on OCR in its current state to carry out its legally required responsibilities.
Reversing the department’s reductions, as Joun ordered, “would not require this court to manage the day-to-day affairs of the department, it would simply restore the status quo until this court can determine whether Defendants acted unlawfully,” he wrote.
