Overview
Cohen Milstein represents the NAACP and parents of public school students in a case brought with the National Education Association that challenges the efforts by the U.S. Department of Education to dismantle the agency, pursuant to an Executive Order issued on March 20, 2025.
Plaintiffs allege that since January 20, 2025, the Administration has taken drastic, escalating steps to incapacitate the Department, including the cancelation of $1.5 billion in grants and contracts for the performance of core functions and mass layoffs of half its workforce. Taken together, Plaintiffs claim, these actions constitute a de facto dismantling of the Department by executive fiat. These actions are alleged to be unconstitutional and to violate the Administrative Procedure Act.
Plaintiffs seek an order declaring the Department’s actions to be unlawful and enjoining the Department from any additional efforts to dismantle offices and restoring the services that have been effectively discontinued.
Important Dates
- On March 25, 2025, plaintiffs filed NAACP, et al. v. U.S. and U.S. Dept. of Education, et al. before the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
Case Background
Created in 1979, the U.S. Department of Education is charged by Congress with advancing educational opportunity and quality by implementing the nation’s federal education laws in all fifty states and in hundreds of thousands of schools, colleges and universities.
Despite Congress’s mandates and the Department’s successes, President Donald J. Trump has repeatedly insisted he will “eliminate the federal Department of Education,” and give “education back to the States.”
To fulfill that stated goal, Department officers have taken a series of escalating steps since January 20, 2025, to abolish the Congressionally created, constituted and funded agency. They terminated at least $1.5 billion in awarded contracts and grants for required research, evaluation, and data collection as well as teacher training and recruitment programs established by Congress. They have brought to a grinding halt the Department’s enforcement of federal civil rights laws. And Defendants have eviscerated the Department’s workforce, cutting the staff in half since January 20, 2025, through a combination of deferred resignations, early retirement incentives, and staff terminations, culminating on March 11, 2025, in a massive reduction in force (“RIF”) of approximately 1,300 Department workers.
The March 11 RIF, for instance, reached every corner of the Department and eliminated all or nearly all employees in certain Department offices. Debilitating cuts were made to the Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”), the Office of Federal Student Aid (“FSA”), and the Institute for Education Sciences (“IES”). The RIF’s effects have been so devastating that the Department can no longer discharge its mandatory statutory functions.
Plaintiffs claim that the Constitution gives power over “the establishment of offices [and] the determination of their functions and jurisdiction” to Congress—not to the President or any officer working under him. Myers v. United States, 272 U.S. 52, 129 (1926). Executive agencies like the Department “are creatures of statute,” brought into existence by Congress and taken out of existence only by Congress, through bicameralism and presentment. Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. OSHA, 595 U.S. 109, 117 (2022). And if Congress cannot delegate far more modest grants of regulatory authority through “modest words,” “vague terms,” or “subtle devices,” West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697, 723 (2022), then an agency surely lacks any constitutional or statutory authority to cease its statutorily mandated functions, or hollow out its workforce so dramatically that it lacks the capacity to execute them, without any direction from Congress at all.
Plaintiffs claim that the Department’s unlawful elimination of its congressionally-mandated services violates the separation of powers and the Constitution’s Take Care, Spending, and Appropriations Clauses. It is also contrary to law, and arbitrary and capricious, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”).
If allowed to stand, Defendants’ actions will irrevocably harm the Plaintiffs members who are parents, students and teachers engaged in PK-12 and postsecondary education across the United States.