A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump from dismantling the Department of Education on Thursday, ruling that it cannot be done without congressional approval.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun’s order blocks the Trump administration from carrying out the mass-firing at the DOE announced in March and orders that any employees who were already fired be reinstated.
Joun’s order noted Trump’s repeated calls to shut down the department while on the campaign trail, and argued the reduction in force was his means of doing so.
“The idea that Defendants’ actions are merely a ‘reorganization’ is plainly not true,” Joun wrote.
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“Defendants do acknowledge, as they must, that the Department cannot be shut down without Congress’s approval, yet they simultaneously claim that their legislative goals (obtaining Congressional approval to shut down the Department) are distinct from their administrative goals (improving efficiency). There is nothing in the record to support these contradictory positions,” his ruling continues.
The ruling comes just a day after another federal judge blocked Trump’s administration from firing two Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board on Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton found that allowing unilateral firings would prevent the board from carrying out its purpose.
Walton wrote that allowing at-will removals would make the board “beholden to the very authority it is supposed to oversee on behalf of Congress and the American people.”
The oversight board was initially created by Congress to ensure that federal counterterrorism policies were in line with privacy and civil liberties law.
The two plaintiffs, Travis LeBlanc and Edward Felten, argued in their lawsuit that members of the board cannot be fired without cause. Meanwhile, lawyers for Trump’s administration argued that members of other congressionally created boards do have explicit job protections, and it would therefore be wrong for Walton to create such protections where they are absent.
“The Constitution gives President Trump the power to remove personnel who exercise his executive authority,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields told the Associated Press. “The Trump Administration looks forward to ultimate victory on the issue.”
