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President Donald Trump attends the 157th National Memorial Day Observance at Arlington National Cemetery, Monday, May 26, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
The Trump administration secured a key victory on Thursday as a Maryland federal court upheld a Department of Education (DOE) decision to downsize a specific group of employees.
In a 13-page memorandum opinion, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher, originally nominated by Barack Obama and eventually appointed by President Donald Trump, rejected efforts to preliminarily enjoin mass layoffs at the Institute of Education Sciences (IES).
In early April, two professional associations representing educational researchers sued the DOE over a “reduction-in-force” (RIF) that cut 90% of staff at the IES. The 47-page complaint also took issue with what the plaintiffs termed “a thoughtless and sweeping cancellation of contracts” supporting “intensive studies” on various education methods as well as “data collection and dissemination.”
In late April, the plaintiffs moved for injunctive relief, requesting the court reverse the RIF, rehire the fired employees, reinstate the canceled contracts and affirmatively stop the government from destroying any of the data the IES had previously collected.
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The court, in rejecting the injunction request, said, “The record in this case underscores that it is poorly suited for preliminary relief.”
“In asking this Court to order the government to reinstate a large number of employees without any information about which employees performed critical statutory functions and which did not, Plaintiffs again seek an overbroad mandatory injunction,” Gallagher wrote in the opinion. “Plaintiffs have not shown they have standing to seek that relief.”
In a memorandum supporting the injunction request, the plaintiffs argued they had organizational, or associational, standing — a somewhat disfavored concept under current U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence, which often falls prey to government challenges.
“Plaintiffs are membership associations of education researchers,” the 53-page memo argued. “These researchers face, and are already experiencing, innumerable harms as a result of IES’s destruction.”
The government for its part, in a 31-page memorandum of law in opposition, argued the plaintiffs had failed to offer specific facts that at least one of their identified members had suffered or would suffer actual or imminent and concrete harm — reciting the elements required to sustain the organizational theory of standing.
“Plaintiffs’ theory of standing amounts to a causal chain of reductions-in-force and contract cancellations that plaintiffs allege will impair the Department from providing the information Plaintiffs’ members seek,” the government’s motion argued. “That is insufficient to confer standing.”
The victory for the Trump administration here is the latest iteration of a by-now familiar judicial tactic — rejecting a plaintiff’s claims using the analytical framework widely understood by legal scholars as “conservative standing doctrine.”
This judicial theory was created in two cases from the 1920s by conservative judges who sought to restrain the use and limits of constitutional redress. In other words, standing doctrine was created — and has over time been honed and sustained — to limit lawsuits against the government. While technically procedural in nature, as opposed to relying on the underlying merits arguments in a dispute, standing arguments tend to be fact-intensive.
The court makes clear, however, that the plaintiffs have failed to prove significant harm that warrants a preliminary injunction.
In her opinion, Gallagher insisted the inquiry so far has not been on the merits, that the record in the case is insufficient, and that she believes the plaintiffs might stand a chance down the line.
“Plaintiffs seem to be right that, today, IES is not doing a number of tasks Congress requires of it,” the opinion reads. “And they may well be right that IES is unlikely to fulfill many of its statutory functions in the future. The Court likewise takes Plaintiffs at their word that not receiving data they expected to receive will harm them.”
So far, the judge says, the plaintiff’s arguments — which are premised on a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), the federal statute governing agency actions and outlining how to challenge them in court — have not been convincing.
From the opinion, at length:
Although at different points Plaintiffs have framed their contract-termination arguments broadly and narrowly, both of those approaches have serious problems. Where Plaintiffs frame their contract claims as one sweeping agency action, they lump in swaths of individual terminations that likely were within the government’s discretion. They also seem to make the kind of programmatic challenge the APA disfavors, and struggle to demonstrate a singular final agency action. But in a second round of briefing, Plaintiffs’ efforts to be more particular have created a dizzying array of factual discrepancies and have fostered disputes over the proper interpretations of no fewer than a dozen statutes.
In terms of the APA challenge, the court says the plaintiffs have essentially targeted the rules and regulations at the DOE regarding the IES, instead of limiting their challenge to specific instances of alleged lawbreaking.
“Plaintiffs ask this Court to act as indiscriminately as they claim the government did when terminating the contracts,” the opinion goes on. “APA relief must be drawn by scalpel, not battering ram.”
Still, Gallagher goes to great lengths to make the parties understand she has strong misgivings about the DOE’s restructuring of IES.
“This Court’s assessment is a preliminary one based on a limited and quickly evolving record,” the opinion goes on. “It is not, and should not be taken as, predictive of this Court’s ultimate decision on the merits. These Plaintiffs have alleged, and have provided some evidence to support, a troubling pattern of conduct at IES. They have plausibly suggested that IES will be unable to fulfill its statutory duties in its shrunken state.”
After a lengthy discussion, the opinion concludes with a similar bit of foreshadowing, suggesting both parties are likely to win and lose:
This Court believes, as it said to the parties at the preliminary injunction hearing, that the right answer in this case lies somewhere in between the parties’ divergent positions. The government has some discretion to downsize agencies so long as they can accomplish all of their statutory directives. It has likely gone too far in downsizing IES. But Plaintiffs have not shown that IES’s authorizing statutes required it to operate precisely as it did before February, 2025. The government must operate IES in a way that complies with statutory requirements, not exactly as past administrations have. This Court is of the view that this case will be best resolved on the merits, with more information to aid this Court in finding the proper middle ground.
Noting a sense of “some urgency” in the case, Gallagher instructed the associations and the government to confer on a briefing schedule and submit it to the court by June 19.
