Judge halts Trump’s education department overhaul

A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday, pausing President Donald Trump’s executive order to dismantle the federal Department of Education. U.S. District Judge Myong Joun cited concerns about negative impacts on the national education system and particularly to individual states and school districts. Plaintiffs showed how the department’s dismantling will cause irreparable harm to America’s most vulnerable student populations with the loss of essential services, the Biden appointee wrote. The ruling came out of a case that consolidated two lawsuits against the administration, one posed by a group of state attorneys general and the other from a coalition of education groups.

The Education Department announced planned layoffs of nearly half its workforce days after Trump signed the shutdown order. The new injunction ordered that all employees terminated during the mass firing be reinstated. The court can’t close its eyes as the terminations reduce the department to a shell of its former self, Joun wrote.

How are people responding? The legal organization Democracy Forward represented education groups in the lawsuit and praised Joun’s ruling. No one’s lives are improving with the Trump administration’s teardown of the DOE, according to Democracy Forward President and CEO Skye Perryman.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., also characterized the ruling as a good step for the kids of America in a Thursday statement. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., described Trump’s executive order as an illegal scheme. The president is not a king, and this ruling is a win for working families and understaffed schools, she wrote. Democratic representatives from across the country echoed similar sentiments, including Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett, New Mexico Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, Maryland Rep. Glenn F. Ivey, and California Rep. Eric Swalwell.

But others applauded the ruling. The Education Department still needs to be shut down, and this ruling doesn’t change that, the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom Director Neal McCluskey wrote Thursday. He added that children in the United States were educated for more than two centuries without the department. McCluskey went on to characterize the department as unconstitutional, ineffective, and unnecessarily expensive.

Dig deeper: Read Lauren Canterberry’s report on Trump’s executive order for more background.