The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday for permission to proceed with plans to lay off hundreds of employees at the Department of Education after lower courts paused those actions.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer called the pause on President Donald Trump’s actions an attempt by the district court to thwart “the Executive Branch’s authority to manage the Department of Education despite lacking jurisdiction to second-guess the Executive’s internal management decisions.”

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“In this case, the district court is attempting to prevent the Department from restructuring its workforce, despite lacking jurisdiction several times over. Intervention is again warranted,” Sauer said in the application to the high court.

A judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts paused Trump’s March executive order seeking to reduce the Education Department’s workforce by roughly 1,400 positions, and a federal appeals court upheld the pause earlier this week. The March executive order signed by Trump promised to effectively gut the department, which was created in 1979, and significantly reduce its ranks.

Sauer argued to the high court that restoring the jobs of the nearly 1,400 people the Trump administration laid off would inflict “irreparable harm” on the administration, “insofar as it requires the government to pay salaries it cannot possibly recoup.”

He also disputed the claim by the Democratic states suing to block the executive order that the layoffs include people necessary for the department to function as congressionally mandated.

“The injunction rests on the untenable assumption that every terminated employee is necessary to perform the Department of Education’s statutory functions,” Sauer argued. “That injunction effectively appoints the district court to a Cabinet role and bars the Executive Branch from terminating anyone, even though respondents conceded that some other RIFs would plainly be proper.”

U.S. District Court Judge Myong Joun sided with the Democratic states, challenging the attempted layoffs at the Education Department. He argued that the Trump administration’s actions were not purely a discretionary use of executive power over the department.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit denied the Trump administration’s request to stay the lower court’s ruling on Wednesday, ruling that Justice Department lawyers had not “shown that the public’s interest lies in permitting a major federal department to be unlawfully disabled from performing its statutorily assigned functions.”

The petition to the high court is the latest request by the Trump administration to lift a lower court’s pause of a Trump executive order seeking to reduce the size of the federal workforce.

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Earlier this week, Sauer asked the Supreme Court to allow the administration to proceed with sweeping reductions in force across various federal agencies.

The significant number of pauses of Trump administration actions granted by lower courts has led to the administration asking the Supreme Court for urgent actions numerous times, causing the high court’s emergency docket to fill up with pleas from the administration.