The Trump administration on Friday filed an emergency application asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in the lawsuit challenging the layoffs of roughly 1,400 U.S. Department of Education employees.
The administration asked the high court to undo a May 22 preliminary injunction by a federal district judge in Massachusetts ordering the department to reverse the layoffs and reinstate all affected employees. The injunction came in a pair of lawsuits brought by New York and 20 other Democratic-led states, two Massachusetts school districts, and the American Federation of Teachers along with other unions.
After a federal appeals court this week declined to block the injunction, the administration went to the high court.
“The injunction rests on the untenable assumption that every terminated employee is necessary to perform the Department of Education’s statutory functions,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the filing in McMahon v. New York. “That injunction effectively appoints the district court to a Cabinet role and bars the Executive Branch from terminating anyone, even though [challengers] conceded that some other [reductions-in-force] would plainly be proper.”
The administration asks first for an immediate administrative stay that would put a hold on the case in light of the fact that the district court has scheduled a hearing for June 9, the same day full pay and benefits for the affected employees are set to end.
“An administrative stay … is warranted while the court assesses this application,” Sauer says.
The court on Friday afternoon asked the challengers to respond to the overall emergency filing by June 13 at 4 p.m. That is a fairly typical response time for an emergency docket request such as this, and it does not preclude the court from issuing an administrative stay by June 9.
A quick trip from appeals court to the Supreme Court emergency docket
U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun of Boston, an appointee of President Joe Biden, ruled that the challengers 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.”
On June 4, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, in Boston, declined the Trump administration’s request to block the injunction.
“What is at stake in this case, the District Court found, was whether a nearly half-century-old cabinet department would be permitted to carry out its statutorily assigned functions or prevented from doing so by a mass termination of employees aimed at implementing the effective closure of that department,” said Chief Judge David J. Barron, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
The administration has not “shown that the public’s interest lies in permitting a major federal department to be unlawfully disabled from performing its statutorily assigned functions,” Barron said. (The other panel members were appointees of Obama and Biden.)
The administration filed its emergency stay application in the Supreme Court less than two days later.
“The government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education,” Sauer said in his filing. “And the government has acknowledged the need to retain sufficient staff to continue fulfilling statutorily mandated functions and has kept the personnel that, in its judgment, are necessary for those tasks.”
The lawsuits merely speculate that the department has effectively been “shut down,” he said.
One of Sauer’s key arguments: Only the laid-off Education Department employees would have legal standing to challenge their job actions—not states, school districts, or teachers’ unions. And the employees would have to do so through the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, not first in federal court, he says.
“Strangers to the employment relationship should not be able to leapfrog that process and leverage federal court injunctions to force mass reinstatements,” Sauer writes.
The solicitor general said he found it strange that the 1st Circuit recognized that reinstating the laid-off employees would require the Education Department to pay salaries that “it cannot possibly recoup,” yet declined to block the injunction.
“As a legal matter, uncertainty, fear, mays, and ifs do not create” constitutional standing to sue, Sauer said. The challengers “have not identified any actual losses of federal funds or financial aid,” and they “offer only rank speculation that an agency with over 2,000 remaining employees will abruptly halt its statutory functions.”.
The Supreme Court has decided more than a dozen emergency applications related to actions of the second Trump administration. It has both denied and provided the requested relief sought by the government. In April, the court ruled 5-4 in Department of Education v. California to grant the Trump administration’s emergency request to immediately terminate more than 100 grants under two federal teacher-training programs.
The court has also issued administrative-stay orders in some of those Trump-related cases to give itself more time to consider the filings from both sides.
