The court found that the staff cuts are likely unconstitutional and must be reversed.
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration may not carry out mass firings at the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), finding that such an action likely violates both the Constitution and administrative law.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun in Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction on June 18, blocking the Education Department’s March 11 large-scale reduction in force (RIF), which shuttered seven of OCR’s 12 regional offices and cut over half of its workforce.
The judge found that the plaintiffs in the case—two students with active OCR civil rights complaints and the nonprofit Victim Rights Law Center (VRLC)—would suffer irreparable harm if the layoffs were allowed to stand. He concluded that the firings had severely undermined OCR’s ability to enforce federal civil rights laws protecting students from discrimination based on sex, race, and disability.
“I found that Consolidated Plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their claims that the mass terminations hamstring the Department’s ability to meet its statutory functions and that the RIF effectively eliminates the Department without Congressional approval, in violation of the [Administrative Procedures Act] APA and the Constitution,” the judge wrote in his order.
The two student plaintiffs said they experienced severe race-based and disability-based harassment in school, and had filed complaints with OCR that were still pending when the layoffs hit. They claimed their cases had stalled and that OCR no longer had the personnel to investigate or resolve them in a timely manner, jeopardizing their education.
VRLC, the third plaintiff, argued that the mass firings made it more difficult to fulfill its mission of providing legal assistance to victims of sexual and gender-based violence, since the federal agency responsible for enforcing student protections had lost much of its investigative capacity.
The case stems from the Trump administration’s broader push to make government operations more efficient and less burdensome to taxpayers. In March, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said that the roughly 50 percent reduction in force was part of the administration’s “commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers.”
By Tom Ozimek
