In 1979, Congress created the Department of Education when it passed the Department of Education Organization Act. The bill was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, who subsequently executed the law by standing up the new Cabinet-level agency. Every president since then, whether they supported the existence of the agency or not, staffed and ran the agency as required by the law passed by Congress.

That is, until Donald Trump began his second term. Although Congress had passed and a president had signed the law creating the agency, Trump moved to abolish it unilaterally through executive orders and a severe reduction in staff that would make its operations — which, again, are required by law — impossible to execute. Despite lower court rulings pausing Trump’s effort to eliminate the agency by fiat, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority said he could go ahead and dismantle the agency.

Except the conservative justices didn’t actually say anything at all.

On July 14, they overturned a lower court injunction that had paused Trump’s order while courts weighed whether he had the power to dismantle the agency. And they provided no explanation whatsoever.

“The May 22, 2025 preliminary injunction entered by the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, case No. 1:25–cv–10601, is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought,” the brief, unsigned majority opinion says. “Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.”

The court’s unexplained decision received a harsh rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a dissent, more than 10 times longer than the actual majority order, joined by the court’s other two liberal justices.

“[This] decision is indefensible,” Sotomayor wrote. “It hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out. The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”

The decision by the court’s six conservative justices ends the pretense that the nation’s high court is following the law as it judges cases. Instead, it exemplifies how the court has blessed the second Trump administration’s efforts to force a “post-constitutional” moment on the country and reorder the structure of national government to their benefit. In this version of America, neither the courts nor the administration are answerable to the people. So the justices have stopped offering answers at all.

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“What they’re doing is what’s in the best interest of the Republican Party, whether they have reasons or not,” said Eric Segall, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University. “And it would be very difficult for them to write some of these decisions up.”

Since taking office, Trump has pushed well beyond the boundaries of existing legal precedent and the law in trying to dismantle the federal government, centralize power in his own hands and ramp up a deportation machine. The only opposition to these efforts has come from lower court judges, who have overwhelmingly blocked those policies or actions, while courts hear the cases to determine their legality. This is standard practice: Normally, courts try to preserve the status quo in case of a ruling against the government. The lower court rulings against Trump have also been bipartisan, as the judges issuing injunctions were appointed by presidents of both parties.

To counter this lower court opposition, Trump has appealed those decisions to the Supreme Court — where he has found great success. The court has overturned 77% of the injunctions placed on Trump administration policies by lower court judges, according to Stanford University political science professor Adam Bonica. And it has failed to provide an explanation for its actions in seven decisions on the emergency docket it has issued since the beginning of May, including its decision on the Department of Education, according to Georgetown University School of Law professor Stephen Vladeck.

What’s more, the court also greatly restricted the ability of lower courts to even issue national injunctions at all, in a controversial decision involving birthright citizenship.

“What they’re doing now is letting Trump destroy the status quo when lower court judges are saying it’s illegal,” Segall said. “How do you defend that? So, they’re not [defending it].”

While it is not unusual for decisions to be made in the judicial system without explanation, it is unusual for this to happen in important cases with high stakes in an appellate court like the Supreme Court. Failing to provide explanations not only undermines the court in the public eye, it also undermines it within the federal judicial system, where lower courts must consider precedent and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of laws when making their own rulings.

That is what played out after the court overturned a lower court ruling preventing the removals of immigrants to countries they are not from on June 23 in an unsigned and unspoken decision in Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. The decision effectively allowed the Trump administration to go forward with sending undocumented immigrants to places with ongoing wars and histories of torture and prisoner mistreatment like South Sudan, where the D.V.D. plaintiffs were sent, or El Salvador, where the administration sent hundreds of Venezuelans into a notorious supermax prison.

Since the court did not provide any explanation for its decision, it created confusion and uncertainty about what should happen next. The lower court judge in the case continued to pursue the case of the D.V.D. plaintiffs, including initiating contempt proceedings against the administration for disobeying his initial decision. This forced the Supreme Court to clarify its June 23 decision by stating that it did apply to those plaintiffs, but the majority still failed to provide any further explanation for its decision.

In a dissent joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor castigated the court’s conservative justices for refusing to explain itself.

“The Court’s continued refusal to justify its extraordinary decisions in this case, even as it faults lower courts for failing properly to divine their import, is indefensible,” Sotomayor wrote.

This unspoken decision will now allow the Trump administration to engage in mass renditions of immigrants to countries that they’ve never been to, without asking them if they fear for their safety in those countries.

It is worth highlighting what the court has done in these rulings: allow for the massive violation of rights of immigrants under U.S. law and the Convention on Torture. It does not justify why, it does not offer a reason for why it may believe these actions are legal. It does not even suggest these actions are, somehow, necessary, despite the violations. It does not provide a single reason. It also allows Trump to unilaterally dismantle a congressionally created agency, undermining years of precedent and destabilizing not only the specific system providing necessary services but also the basic structure of how these systems are implemented. Again, it offers no explanation.

Nor are these the only cases where rights are being violated and laws swept aside without a single word written about why.

On July 8, the court let Trump go ahead with mass firings across the federal government that were spearheaded by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency in another unexplained order. It also allowed the Department of Defense to ban transgender people from serving in the military in an unexplained decision on May 6. And on May 19, the court did not provide an explanation for why it would allow the administration to strip 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants of their temporary protected status.

All of these decisions have potentially irreversible effects, even if courts ultimately rule that the administration’s policy is illegal or unconstitutional. Immigrants stripped of legal protection can be detained and deported, with those sent to third countries ending up beyond the reach of American law — as the administration has argued in the case of the hundreds already sent to El Salvador. Transgender people will be unceremoniously removed from the military, ending promising careers. Government workers will be fired and likely incapable of being rehired.

As for the Department of Education, it would be quite a feat to reconstitute an agency after dismantling it. The court’s decision here is akin to ruling that a person can be drawn and quartered while judges decide whether or not they are guilty.

What happens if they’re found innocent? You can’t just put a dismembered corpse back together again.