Supreme Ct Expands Pres Power Allowing Trump to Dismantle Dept of Educ.

The right-wing majority on the Supreme Court yesterday granted a stay on a lower court’s order that the Trump administration could not gut the Department of Education while the issue is in the courts.The order by the court was unsigned and gave no reasoning, as is typical in such emergency applications. No vote count was given, which is usual for emergency orders. The majority thus throws the weight of the Supreme Court behind the ability of the Trump administration to get rid of departments established by Congress—a power the Supreme Court denied when President Richard M. Nixon tried it in 1973.

The Trump administration has announced plans to fire more than 1,300 workers, a move that would effectively gut the department, which manages federal loans for college, tracks student achievement and enforces civil rights laws in schools.

The Education Department began the year with more than 4,000 employees. The administration also fired some probationary workers and offered employees the ability to resign. Altogether, after the terminations, the Education Department will have a work force of about half the size it did before Mr. Trump returned to office.

The move by the justices represents an expansion of presidential power, allowing Mr. Trump to dismantle the inner workings of a government department created by Congress without legislators’ input. The firings will hobble much of the department’s work, supporters argued in court filings. Particularly hard hit was the department’s Office for Civil Rights, which had seven of its 12 offices shuttered.

It 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.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissent, joined by the court’s other two liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

The three argued that Mr. Trump had overstepped his authority with his “unilateral efforts to eliminate a cabinet-level agency established by Congress nearly half a century ago.”

“Only Congress has the power to abolish the department,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in her 19-page dissent.The court’s decision, she wrote, would have severe consequences for the country’s students by unleashing “untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended.”

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The order is technically temporary, in effect only while courts continue to consider the legality of Mr. Trump’s move. In practice, fired workers whom a Boston judge had ordered be reinstated are now again subject to removal from their jobs.

This is a major expansion of presidential power, permitting the president to disregard laws Congress has passed, despite the Constitution’s clear assignment of lawmaking power to Congress alone.

President Donald J. Trump has vowed to eliminate the Department of Education because he claims it pushes “woke” ideology on America’s schoolchildren and that its employees “hate our children.” Running for office, he promised to “return” education to the states. In fact, the Education Department has never set curriculum; it disburses funds for high-poverty schools and educating students with disabilities. It’s also in charge of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race and sex in schools that get federal funding.

Trump’s secretary of education, professional wrestling promoter Linda McMahon, supports Trump’s plan to dismantle the department. In March the department announced it would lay off 1,378 employees—about half the department. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the layoffs, and Massachusetts federal judge Myong Joun ordered the department to reinstate the fired workers. The Supreme Court has now put that order on hold, permitting the layoffs to go forward.

Another Trump power grab is before Congress today as the Senate considers what are called “rescissions.” These are a request from the White House for Congress to approve $9.4 billion in cuts it has made in spending that Congress approved. By law, the president cannot decide not to spend money Congress has appropriated, although officials in the Trump administration did so as soon as they took office. Passing this rescission package would put Congress’s stamp of approval on those cuts, even though they change what Congress originally agreed to.

Those cuts include ending federal support for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps to fund National Public Radio (NPR), the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), and local stations. The Trump administration says NPR and PBS “fuel…partisanship and left-wing propaganda.”

Congress must approve the request by Friday, or the monies will be spent as the laws originally established. The House has already passed the package, but senators are unhappy that the White House has not actually specified what will be cut. Senators will be talking to the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought—a key architect of Project 2025—today in a closed-door session in hopes of getting more information.

In June, Vought told CNN that this package is just “the first of many rescissions bills” and that if Congress won’t pass them, the administration will hold back funds under what’s called “impoundment,” although Congress explicitly outlawed that process in the 1974 Impoundment Control Act.

SUPREME COURT LOOKS AT RELIGIOUS CHARTER SCHOOLS

A girl in Nevada leads her class in the Pledge of Allegiance with her hand on a Bible. Isadora Kosofsky for The New York Times

Faith in schools

By Adam Liptak

I cover the Supreme Court.

In just the last month, the Supreme Court has heard three important religion cases, culminating in yesterday’s argument over a Catholic charter school in Oklahoma. Judging from the justices’ questioning, the side pressing religious-freedom claims seemed likely to prevail in all three.

That would extend a remarkable winning streak for religion at the Supreme Court.

Since 2012, the pro-religion side has won all but one of 16 First Amendment cases about the government’s relationship with faith. (The exception: The court rejected a challenge to the first Trump administration’s ban on travel from several predominantly Muslim countries.)

The court has been especially active in cases involving religious education. It said if the government was helping private schools, it couldn’t exclude religious ones. It exempted religious schools from anti-discrimination laws. In one pending case, the justices seemed poised to let parents with religious objections withdraw their children during discussions of gay and transgender themes. Yesterday they seemed likely to let a Catholic organization start a charter school in Oklahoma — which would make it the first religious school to get state charter funds.

A 2021 study of religion rulings since Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court in 2005 found that the Roberts court ruled in favor of religious people and groups over 83 percent of the time, compared with about 50 percent of the time for other courts since 1953. “In most of these cases, the winning religion was a mainstream Christian organization, whereas in the past pro-religion outcomes more frequently favored minority or marginal religious organizations,” the study’s authors — Lee Epstein, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Eric Posner, of the University of Chicago — wrote.

If the court rules in favor of religious claims in all three of the pending cases, that figure will rise to 88 percent.

A movement

By Sarah Mervosh

I cover education.

Regardless of what the justices decide about yesterday’s Oklahoma case, state money is already helping faith bloom in American education.

The main vehicle is via school vouchers, which have proliferated in Republican-led states.

Vouchers allow you to use taxpayer money — funds the government would have spent on a public school — to pay for your kid’s private school (or home-school supplies). More than half of states have such programs, and more than one million students use them, double the number in 2019.

The Supreme Court blessed vouchers for religious schools in a 2002 case, but their use took off after the pandemic as more states embraced them widely. In states like Florida, where vouchers have expanded to be available to all students, some religious schools now receive nearly all of their funding from state dollars, said Doug Tuthill, who helps manage Florida’s program.

States are looking for other ways to expand religion in public schools, too. Oklahoma wants to put Bibles in its classrooms. Louisiana is in a legal battle to get the Ten Commandments in every classroom. Texas is considering a similar move.

State lawmakers pushing to expand religion in public schools sometimes cite the Supreme Court rulings that my colleague Adam mentions above, such as a 2022 decision siding with a football coach who prayed at the 50-yard line after games. “There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in our Constitution, and recent Supreme Court decisions by President Trump’s appointees reaffirmed this,” said a lawmaker in Texas, who put forth a bill proposing prayer in schools.