The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the administration of President Donald Trump can proceed with plans to slash funding and resources for the federal Department of Education.

The top court’s conservative majority on Monday lifted a federal judge’s order that had reinstated nearly 1,400 workers affected by mass layoffs at the department and blocked the administration from transferring key functions to other federal agencies.

The move comes as a legal challenge is continuing to play out in lower courts.

Al Jazeera’s Shihab Rattansi, reporting from Washington, DC, said the top court’s decision is a “massive win” for the Trump administration.

“The Department of Education was set up in 1979 by Congress, and only an act of Congress could shut it down, but instead, what the Trump administration is doing is sacking so many people within the Department of Education that effectively, it is shut down,” Rattansi said.

“That’s what the lower courts found when they put a stay on all the firings at the Department of Education,” he explained.

“The Supreme Court now has accepted the government’s arguments that all these firings are just part of removing bureaucratic votes, even despite the quite explicit executive order from Trump calling for the Department of Education to be dismantled,” Rattansi said.

This means that “even if Trump loses the litigation concerning slimming down the Department of Education, effectively everyone will have been fired already
 and so they will have succeeded without having had to go to Congress to formally ask the Department of Education’s dissolution”, he added.

‘Major victory’

Trump hailed the top court’s decision in a statement on his Truth Social platform.

He said the ruling handed a “Major Victory to Parents and Students across the Country”, and that it will allow his administration to begin the “very important process” of returning many of the department’s functions “BACK TO THE STATES”.

Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said it was a “shame” that it took the Supreme Court’s intervention to let Trump’s plan move ahead.

“Today, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the President of the United States, as the head of the Executive Branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies,” McMahon said in a statement.

Monday’s ruling cancels a previous order on the administration’s efforts to fire the workers at the Education Department, which US District Judge Myong Joun had ruled against in May, stating that it would “likely cripple the department”.

A US Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling on June 4 that the cuts would make it “effectively impossible for the Department to carry out its statutory functions”, which include overseeing student loans and enforcing civil rights law in US education, the site of previous political battles over issues such as federal efforts to combat racial segregation.

Democracy Forward, a liberal legal group representing the school districts and unions, said the court’s action “dealt a devastating blow to this nation’s promise of public education for all children”.

“We will aggressively pursue every legal option as this case proceeds to ensure that all children in this country have access to the public education they deserve,” said Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO.

The Supreme Court’s action came in a brief, unsigned order. Its three liberal justices dissented.

The justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, said their colleagues’ ruling presented a “grave” threat “to our Constitution’s separation of powers”.

“As Congress mandated, the Department plays a vital role in this Nation’s education system, safeguarding equal access to learning and channeling billions of dollars to schools and students across the country each year,” the three justices wrote.

Critics have accused the Trump administration of working to effectively abolish federal agencies, established and funded by Congress, through a maximalist interpretation of executive power.

Trump and his Republican allies have depicted federal agencies as being at odds with their political agenda, and as hotbeds of leftist ideology and bureaucratic excess.

The Trump administration has also sought to impose greater control over US universities, seeking a larger role in shaping curricula and threatening to withdraw federal funds if universities do not comply with government demands concerning issues such as cracking down on pro-Palestine student activism.

Monday’s ruling is the latest win for the Trump administration in the nation’s top court.

Late last month, the court ruled that lower courts likely overstepped their authority in issuing nationwide injunctions against presidential actions, limiting the ability of the judicial branch to check executive power.