Dismantling the Department of Education, Without Saying Why

The Atlantic

2 days ago

The Supreme Court is allowing Donald Trump to dismantle the Department of Education. But it won't say why.
Yesterday—almost exactly a week after the Court lifted a lower court's block on Trump's plans to fire thousands of federal employees—a majority of the justices decided to give the president the go-ahead for a different set of mass layoffs. Last week, the Court provided a handful of sentences that vaguely gestured at why it might have allowed the administration to move forward. This week, it offered nothing at all. There's something taunting, almost bullying, about this lack of reasoning, as if the conservative supermajority is saying to the country: You don't even deserve an explanation.
Whereas last week's case involved orders to lay off employees from across the entire federal government, this week's involves just the Education Department. Over the course of his 2024 campaign and in the first few months of his second term, Trump repeatedly announced his plans to close the agency. The department was 'a big con job,' he told reporters in February, and he would 'like to close it immediately.' In March, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced plans to cut the department's workforce in half. Trump followed up with an executive order mandating that McMahon 'take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.'
There was one minor problem with this plan: The executive branch, at least theoretically, did not have the unilateral authority to abolish the Education Department, which was created by an act of Congress in 1979. A coalition of states, school districts, and unions sued, and a federal district court temporarily blocked the administration from moving forward. That court order required the department to rehire employees already laid off, pointing to both the Constitution and a statutory prohibition against 'arbitrary and capricious' actions by federal agencies.
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In that lower court, the government argued that it sought only to improve the 'efficiency' and 'accountability' of the department through 'reorganization,' but District Judge Myong J. Joun was unconvinced. 'A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all,' he wrote. An appeals court upheld Joun's ruling, freezing Trump's plans while the district court continued to weigh the underlying legal questions.
At this point— stop me if you've heard this one before —the Supreme Court stepped in. Despite a frustrated dissent from the Court's three liberal justices, the majority's unsigned emergency ruling allowed Trump to carry out his plans while the litigation in the lower courts continues. 'The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive,' Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, 'but either way the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave.' She went on: 'The President must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them.'
The odd protocol of the Court's emergency docket—sometimes called the 'shadow docket'—means that the underlying question of whether Trump has the legal authority to tear apart the Education Department remains unresolved, even as a majority of the justices have allowed him to carry out his plans. Courts—even the Supreme Court—could still find the department's dismantling illegal down the road. But in the meantime, the agency will have been devastated, perhaps irreparably. Layoffs will dramatically reduce the staffing of the already overworked Office of Civil Rights, which is responsible for ensuring equal access to education, including for disabled students. The administration will eviscerate the office responsible for helping students with financial aid for higher education; the government has said that this portion of the agency's portfolio will be shifted over to the Treasury Department, but what this will look like in practice is unclear. The cuts will almost erase the Institute for Education Science, which publishes authoritative data on American schools and has already missed key deadlines this year.
Given the potentially devastating effects of the Supreme Court's ruling on congressionally mandated programs, it's all the more galling that the majority didn't bother to provide even a cursory explanation of its thinking. This terseness has become common as the Court has scaled up its use of emergency rulings—rulings that, it's hard not to notice, have a striking tendency to align with the Trump administration's priorities. Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University and an authority on the shadow docket, tallied the Education Department order as the 15th since early April in which the Court has granted Trump emergency relief, and the seventh in which the justices have provided not a word of explanation. (Until recently, the shadow docket was used far more rarely, and only for truly urgent matters.) Do the conservative justices feel that the president really does have the legal authority to destroy a Cabinet department on his own? Or perhaps they believe that the plaintiffs lacked the ability to bring the case at all in federal court? Maybe the reason was something else altogether. There's no way to know.
This silence is damaging, both to the legitimacy of the Court and to the rule of law. The judiciary is a branch of government that is meant to provide reasons for its actions—to explain, both to litigants and to the public, why judges have done what they have done. This is part of what distinguishes law from the raw exercise of power, and what anchors the courts as a component of a democratic system rather than setting them apart as unaccountable sages. With a written opinion, people can evaluate the justices' reasoning for themselves. Without it, they are left to puzzle over the Court's thinking like ancients struggling to decipher the wrath of gods in the scattering of entrails.