“Restore the DOE”: Federal judge blocks Trump’s attempt to dismantle Department of Education

A federal judge threw a wrench into President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the Department of Education, ordering the administration to reinstate hundreds of laid-off federal workers and blocking the president’s executive order.

In an injunction issued on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Myong Joun called the Trump administration’s actions a blatant end-run around needed congressional approval. 

“The record abundantly reveals that the defendants’ true intention is to effectively dismantle the department without an authorizing statute,” Joun wrote in the ruling.

Joun offered a host of reasons for granting a preliminary injunction, saying that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits, were facing imminent harm, and that the actions taken by Trump’s administration were arbitrary and capricious and exceeded their authority under the law. 

The order required Trump officials to reverse the layoffs and halt any further actions to reduce the size of the Cabinet department.

Joun’s ruling was one of several blows issued to the conservative movement against public education by the courts on Thursday. In a split ruling, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision to block the creation of the nation’s first religious charter school. 

The prospective St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School would have been the first religious school in the nation to operate under a privately run, publicly funded charter agreement. The school was opposed by Oklahoma’s Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who seemed to fear that the precedent set by St. Isidore would allow public funding for “radical Islamic schools.”

Drummond called out the state’s governor and superintendent of education by name in a post to X, celebrating their apparent loss at the high court.

“I fought them at every turn to uphold our Christian values and defend religious liberty—and won,” he wrote.

Oklahoma offers tax credits to help offset tuition at private schools, including those run by religious institutions.