After months of uncertainty, a federal appeals court ruled Monday that the Education Department can move forward with firing half of the 550 employees at its Office for Civil Rights. 

In March, the department enacted a reduction-in-force plan to eliminate nearly half of its employees, including 276 at OCR, as part of wider effort to dismantle the 45-year-old agency. Those RIFs prompted multiple lawsuits against the department, including New York v. McMahon and the Victim Rights Law Center v. Department of Education; while the former challenged RIFs across the entire department, the latter case was restricted to the RIFs within OCR. 

Federal district judges issued injunctions in both cases during the litigation process. Then, in July, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the McMahon case that the department could proceed with firing half its staff. Despite that ruling, a federal judge in Massachusetts refused to vacate the injunction preventing the department from firing the staff at OCR, arguing that the cases—and therefore their related rulings—remained separate. 

The government appealed that decision and requested a stay of the RIF injunction. On Monday the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit granted that request, giving OCR the green light to fire half its staff.   

“We note the district court’s careful analysis concluding that the Department’s decision to reduce by half the staff of OCR, a statutorily-created office, imperils Congress’s mandate that OCR ‘enforce federal civil rights laws that ban discrimination based on race, sex, and disability in the public education system,’” the court’s opinion read. “In this stay posture and at this preliminary stage of the litigation, however, we cannot conclude that this case differs enough from McMahon to reach a contrary result to the Supreme Court’s order staying the injunction in McMahon.”