The Trump administration is imploring a federal court to bin a lawsuit challenging the wholesale restructuring of the U.S. Department of Education.

On March 20, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Improving Education Outcomes by Empowering Parents, States, and Communities.” The order broadly summarizes the 45th and 47th president’s long-promised plans to shutter the Jimmy Carter-era agency. Prior to that, Education Secretary Linda McMahon had issued a series of directives – including mass firings and grant rescissions – geared toward dismantling the agency.

A coalition of plaintiffs led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sued four days after the executive order was issued, calling the federal government’s actions “unconstitutional” and in violation of “Congress’s directives in creating the Department and assigning it specific duties and appropriations.”

In July, the plaintiffs filed a motion for a preliminary injunction.

Now, the Trump administration is seeking to end the case outright by asking the court to toss both the complaint and the injunction request.

In a recently filed 58-page motion to dismiss, the U.S. Department of Justice largely focused the district court’s attention on rulings in other courts concerning the Department of Education and its plans to lay off staff, rescind grants, and cancel contracts. In each of those cases, the DOJ notes, the Trump administration secured limited victories.

“Plaintiffs seek too much, too late,” the motion to dismiss begins. “They seek an extraordinarily broad injunction that would enjoin reductions in force (RIFs), contract cancellations, and grant terminations, all while challenging virtually every policy change made at the Department of Education since President Trump was inaugurated.”

Of particular importance are two U.S. Supreme Court cases.

In one instance, the nation’s high court stayed a preliminary injunction, effectively allowing the Department of Education to move forward with large-scale RIFs affecting thousands of workers. In the second instance, a majority of justices stayed an injunction – allowing the self-beleaguered agency to cancel some $65 million in grant funds.

Meanwhile, three district court rulings in Maryland and the District of Columbia denied requests for preliminary injunctions against McMahon’s liquidation efforts. The Trump administration hopes U.S. District Judge Julie Rubin, a Joe Biden appointee, can be persuaded by those rulings.

The motion to dismiss also aimed at the plaintiffs’ arguments through both procedural and merits-based attacks.

In an effort to tidily upend the matter in their favor, the Trump administration insists the organizations that filed the lawsuit simply do not have standing to complain in the first place.

This is the latest iteration of an analytical framework widely understood by legal scholars as “conservative standing doctrine.”

The judicial theory was created in 1920s court cases 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 — to limit lawsuits against the government.

Here, the government says, the facts do not support standing to sue.

“Plaintiffs do not profess to know any details about the reorganization within the Department, but nonetheless argue that they have been or will be harmed by this reorganization,” the motion goes on. “In an attempt to prove these speculative harms, Plaintiffs provide numerous declarations hypothesizing harm that may befall them if the Department is unable to provide a particular service or function.”

On the merits front, the government argues the plaintiffs have attacked far too many separate actions – instead of “petitioning for judicial review of a circumscribed and discrete agency action.”

And despite all of the public posturing, the Trump administration argued it is not really trying to shut down the Department of Education through its actions – at least not yet.

“President Trump and Secretary of Education McMahon have been unequivocal that it will take an act of Congress to ultimately shutter the Department,” the motion reads. “In the meantime, Secretary McMahon has used her Article II discretion to reduce the headcount at the Department, cancel grants that do not advance Department priorities, and streamline its operations.”

Here, the government suggests its public-facing language has set a trap for plaintiffs who argue the agency is actually being shut down from the inside – while the actions taken by the agency necessarily cannot amount to such a shutdown on the agency’s own volition.

The broad complaints in the lawsuit suggest the NAACP’s Administrative Procedure Act (APA) claim will fail due to being what, in the parlance of the courts, is known as a “programmatic attack,” the government argued.

“Plaintiffs’ claims and requested injunction present exactly the type of wholesale challenge that the APA forbids,” the motion continues. “They do not seek judicial review of a discrete agency action. Rather, they seek wholesale judicial review of Defendants’ management of the Department of Education. Plaintiffs argue that the ‘closure’ of the Department, the RIFs, the [Institute for Educational Sciences] contract cancellations, and the grant terminations are all final agency actions. The Department is not closing.”

The motion goes on like this, at length:

It is telling that Plaintiffs are unable to identify any concrete, final decision by the Department of Education to shut itself down. To the extent that Plaintiffs are relying on the RIF as the final agency action with respect to the reorganization of the Department, the RIF marks the initiation, not the consummation, of the agency’s decision-making process. The RIF reflects a decision by Department leadership that agency functions need to be streamlined and reorganized.

The plaintiffs now have until Aug. 13 to reply to the government. Oral argument in the case is slated for Aug. 15.