The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
Attorney General Keith Ellison has joined 20 other attorneys general in a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education.
“Donald Trump is not a king and I will not let him be a dictator,” Ellison said in a statement. “He does not have the authority to effectively shut down an entire federal department that is authorized by Congress, and his attempt to do so is illegal and unconstitutional.”
Trump’s education secretary, former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, announced upon taking office that the department’s “final mission” would be to “send education back to the states.” Since Trump took office on January 20 roughly half of the agency’s staff have either been fired or resigned. McMahon has said that a complete shutdown of the department is the administration’s goal.
“This massive reduction in force (RIF) is equivalent to incapacitating key, statutorily-mandated functions of the department, causing immense damage to plaintiff states and their educational systems,” the attorneys general write in their lawsuit.
They argue that under Article 1 of the Constitution, the president “can neither outright abolish an agency nor incapacitate it by cutting away the personnel required to implement the agency’s statutorily-mandated duties,” and that only Congress has the authority to do so.
The Department of Education is responsible for distributing $18 billion in federal funds to support schools in high-poverty areas, and an additional $15 billion in funds for special education.
The department gathers and publishes benchmark data on student achievement, which is used by state and federal policymakers to determine whether students are receiving effective instruction. It also administers the federal financial aid program that helps more than half of the nation’s undergraduate students pay for college.
Impacts at the state level “will include teacher shortages from the loss in salary funding, which in turn will result in increased class sizes,” according to the lawsuit. Special education programs and students on individualized education programs would be especially hard-hit by a loss in federal funding.
The attorneys general are asking the court to vacate the administration’s previous actions affecting the Department of Education, and to issue an injunction against further dismantling of the department.
This is at least the eighth lawsuit against the Trump administration that Minnesota has joined. The others include challenges to administration actions on probationary federal employees; the “Department of Government Efficiency”; birthright citizenship; federal spending; access to the Treasury payments system; restrictions on gender-affirming care; and cuts to National Institutes of Health grants.