The Supreme Court on Monday said President Donald Trump may proceed with his plan to carry out mass layoffs at the Department of Education in the latest win for the White House at the conservative high court.
In an unsigned order, the justices lifted for now a lower-court ruling that had indefinitely paused Trump’s plan. The Supreme Court’s decision puts that ruling on hold while the legal challenge plays out.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal member, said her colleagues had made an “indefensible” decision to let Trump proceed with taking apart an agency that ordinarily can only be dismantled by Congress.
“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. Unable to join in this misuse of our emergency docket, I respectfully dissent,” she wrote.
Trump ordered mass layoffs at the department earlier this year – cutting its workforce in half – but lower courts have blocked that effort, noting that the Education Department was created by Congress.
