WASHINGTON (
States Newsroom
) — A federal appeals court late Wednesday upheld a
lower court’s order
requiring the U.S. Education Department to reinstate more than 1,300 fired employees and blocking an executive order to dismantle the department and a directive to transfer some services to other federal agencies.
The ruling from a three-judge panel in the United States Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit marks a setback for President Donald Trump’s education policy agenda that includes transferring the federal student loan portfolio and special education services out of the Education Department on the way to closing the department entirely.
The panel kept in place a preliminary injunction issued by a district court in Massachusetts requiring the administration to reverse course at least while a case challenging its education policies is ongoing.
“What is at stake in this case, the District Court found, was whether a nearly half-century-old cabinet department would be permitted to carry out its statutorily assigned functions or prevented from doing so by a mass termination of employees aimed at implementing the effective closure of that department,” 1st Circuit Chief Judge David J. Barron wrote in the panel’s
opinion
.
“Given the extensive findings made by the District Court and the absence of any contrary evidence having been submitted by the appellants, we conclude that the appellants’ stay motion does not warrant our interfering with the ordinary course of appellate adjudication in the face of what the record indicates would be the apparent consequences of our doing so,” Barron wrote.
The Trump administration had immediately challenged an order in May from U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun of Massachusetts.
Joun granted a preliminary injunction in a consolidated case stemming from a pair of lawsuits from a coalition of labor and advocacy groups and a slew of Democratic attorneys general.
One of the lawsuits comes from a coalition of Democratic attorneys general in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington state and Wisconsin.
The other lawsuit was brought by the American Federation of Teachers, its Massachusetts chapter, AFSCME Council 93, the American Association of University Professors, the Service Employees International Union and two school districts in Massachusetts.
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
