By Nate Raymond
BOSTON (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday sharply questioned a lawyer from President Donald Trump’s Justice Department who was defending the administration’s move to terminate more than 1,300 U.S. Department of Education employees against a challenge by Democratic-led states.
U.S. District Judge Myong Joun, during a hearing in Boston expressed skepticism about the administration’s arguments. Lawyers for the Republican administration disputed the contention that the mass termination, announced last month, of nearly half of the department’s workforce, amounted to an unlawful effort by Trump to abolish the agency.
Democratic attorneys general from 20 states and the District of Columbia, several school districts and teachers’ unions have challenged those staff terminations in lawsuits before Joun.
“There’s nothing in the record to show Congress has authorized the closure of the department,” Joun, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, told Eric Hamilton, a lawyer for Trump’s Justice Department.
Hamilton responded that the Education Department “is not closed and it is not closing absent an act of Congress,” a goal he said Trump would seek to accomplish through legislation.
The president last month signed an executive order calling for the department’s closure as part of a longstanding campaign promise to conservatives aimed at leaving school policy almost entirely in the hands of states and local boards.
Hamilton said the mass terminations announced a week earlier on March 11 by Secretary of Education Linda McMahon are separate and part of a lawful effort to streamline the department by cutting “bureaucratic bloat.”
But Rabia Muqaddam, a lawyer with New York Attorney General Letitia James’ office, said the cuts were far from a simple reorganization as they had decimated core units and stripped the agency of resources needed to meet its statutory obligations.
She and her co-counsel argued the cuts had already rendered the agency unable to meet its duties to administer funding for public schools, student loans for college students and to enforce civil rights law, harming states and school districts reliant on billions of dollars in federal education funding.
“The department is no longer functioning, and it is getting worse every day,” Muqaddam said.
Hamilton said the state attorneys general wanted a court order “putting themselves as chief human resources officer for the department.” But Joun said he was not sure that was an accurate way to frame the situation.
The Boston judge compared the situation to a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, saying if employees lost their jobs, his concern would be whether he could get served, not whether they get rehired.
“They’re saying, ‘I want my cup of coffee,'” he said.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and David Gregorio)
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