On May 22, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from closing the Education Department. The preliminary injunction issued by District Court Judge Myong J. Joun in Massachusetts reinstated 1,300 Education Department employees and restored “the Department to the status quo.”
The Trump administration argued that President Trump’s executive order calling for its reductions to the Education Department were intended to make the department more efficient, but Joun said that “no evidence that the [reduction-in-force] has actually made the Department more efficient. Rather, the record is replete with evidence of the opposite.”
“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,” Joun wrote. “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.”
The plaintiffs in the case included 20 states and the District of Columbia, as well as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), two school districts and other unions and is the consolidation of two separate cases opposing the reduction in workforce and eventual closure of the Department, according to NPR.
“This decision is a first step to reverse this war on knowledge and the undermining of broad-based opportunity,” Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers (AFT), said. “For America to build a brighter future, we must all take more responsibility, not less, for the success of our children.”
The Department, which originally had 4,133 employees, terminated 1,300 employees on March 11 as part of it’s reduction-in-force, while 600 others decided to resign or retire, leaving the department with half its staff or 2,180 employees. Because of this, plaintiffs argued that the Education Department couldn’t properly manage the federal student loan portfolio to make sure “colleges and universities comply with federal funding requirements and that student loan servicers meet their contractual obligations to serve borrowers,” NPR reported.
The judge also blocked the Trump administration from moving the “management of the entire federal student loan portfolio and the department’s ‘special needs’ programs to other federal agencies,” according to NPR.
“Students in this country are worth a fully functioning Department of Education, and we will not allow political extremism to strip away decades of progress toward educational equity and civil rights protection,” Noreen Farrell, executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, said.
Madi Biedermann, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for communications,said the Trump administration plans to challenge the ruling on an “emergency basis.”
“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,” Biedermann said.
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