The Trump administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and allow the dramatic staffing cuts it has tried to make at the U.S. Department of Education.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the court on Friday to lift an injunction issued last month by a federal judge in Massachusetts and for a broader legal pause until the justices can resolve the matter.
At issue is a May 22 preliminary injunction by District Court Judge Myong J. Joun, blocking President Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon from carrying out an executive order calling for the closure of the Education Department. Joun also ordered the administration "to restore the Department to the status quo" and, more specifically, to reinstate roughly 1,400 employees who were told in March they would lose their jobs.
Those employees are technically on paid administrative leave until June 9, at which point their employment will be terminated – if the reduction-in-force is allowed. Several hundred additional employees have already chosen to take a voluntary buyout, and, with the additional cuts, the department would then have roughly half the staff it had when Trump took office.
"A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all," Joun wrote in his May opinion. "This court cannot be asked to cover its eyes while the Department's employees are continuously fired and units are transferred out until the Department becomes a shell of itself."
That injunction also barred Trump from following through on a pledge he made in the Oval Office to move management of the entire federal student loan portfolio and the department's "special needs" programs to other federal agencies.
On June 4, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agreed with Joun, that the deep staffing cuts would have made it "effectively impossible for the Department to carry out its statutory functions."
In his application to the Supreme Court, Sauer wrote on behalf of the Trump administration that "the government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education" and that these staffing cuts were not part of a department gutting but simply an effort at "streamlining" and thus well within the Executive's purview.
"The Constitution vests the Executive Branch, not district courts, with the authority to make judgments about how many employees are needed to carry out an agency's statutory functions," Sauer wrote.
The administration offered, as evidence that it does not intend to close the department without Congressional approval, a $66.7 billion funding request for fiscal year 2026.
The case is the consolidation of two separate cases, each brought in March in response to the administration's sweeping moves to shrink and eventually close the Education Department. The plaintiffs include 20 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), two school districts and other unions.
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