Federal judge SHUTS DOWN Trump's plan to close the Department of Education
A huge part of Trump's presidential agenda was just blown to smithereens by a federal judge.
A Massachusetts federal judge this Thursday blocked President Trump and US Education Secretary Linda McMahon from enacting Trump’s executive order to close the Department of Education.
The judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate around 1,300 DOE employees who were told in March that they’d be losing their jobs as part of cuts to the department.
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“A department without enough employees to perform statutorily mandated functions is not a department at all. 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,” District Court Judge Myong J. Joun wrote in his ruling.
The DOE’s deputy assistant secretary for communications, Madi Biedermann, slammed the ruling, saying, “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.”
Joun went on to write that he saw “no evidence that the [cuts to the department] has actually made the Department more efficient. Rather, the record is replete with evidence of the opposite.” He also wrote that the Trump administration likely violated the separation of powers by taking actions that conflicted with its "duties to take care to faithfully execute laws enacted by Congress, as well as its duties to expend funds that Congress has authorized it to appropriate."
From NPR:
When President Trump took office, the U.S. Department of Education had 4,133 employees, according to the administration's own numbers.
The reduction-in-force, announced on March 11, terminated the roles of more than 1,300 employees. At the same time, nearly 600 more had chosen to leave by resigning or retiring.
That left roughly 2,180 remaining staff – roughly half the department's size in January.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten praised the ruling, saying it’s a “first step to reverse this war on knowledge and the undermining of broad-based opportunity. For America to build a brighter future, we must all take more responsibility, not less, for the success of our children.”