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U.S. Supreme Court

Supreme Court decision allowing mass firings at Education Department ‘is indefensible,’ dissenters say

By Debra Cassens Weiss

July 15, 2025, 9:43 am CDT

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed mass firings to proceed at the U.S. Education Department, prompting a vigorous dissent from the court’s three liberal justices.

The Supreme Court stayed a May 22 preliminary injunction that ordered the department to restore nearly 1,400 fired employees to their jobs. Acting in response to an emergency request by the Trump administration, the court allowed the firings while a legal challenge continues.

The lifted injunction had also blocked an executive order seeking the department’s shutdown and a plan to transfer some department functions, including student-loan administration, to other agencies.

Education Week, SCOTUSblog and the New York Times are among the publications with coverage.

The majority’s decision “is indefensible,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissent joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

Only Congress has the power to eliminate the U.S. Education Department, yet Trump ordered Education Secretary Linda McMahon to take steps to facilitate its closure “by executive fiat,” Sotomayor said. Consistent with the order, McMahon “gutted the department’s work force, firing over 50 percent of its staff overnight,” Sotomayor said.

“When the executive publicly announces its intent to break the law, and then executes on that promise, it is the judiciary’s duty to check that lawlessness, not expedite it,” Sotomayor wrote.

Instead, the majority “hands the executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. 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.”

The government had argued the firings were intended to “cut bureaucratic bloat.”

U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun had ordered the employees’ reinstatement in a May 22 decision. She ruled in two lawsuits, one by 20 states and the District of Columbia and the other by five labor organizations and two school districts. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals kept the injunction in place in a June 4 decision.

The department cut 2,183 out of 4,133 jobs, Sotomayor said. The reduction in force included 578 people who voluntarily left, Education Week explains.

According to the New York Times, the Supreme Court’s latest order “comes after a decision by the justices last week that cleared the way for the Trump administration to move forward with cutting thousands of jobs across a number of federal agencies, including the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, State and Treasury.”

The case is McMahon v. New York.

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