Judges are pausing Trump's policy changes. But for how long?
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump’s fast and furious efforts to remake and downsize the federal government have hit a bit of a speed bump.
The stunning number of executive orders and other actions taken by Trump in his first weeks in office have generated more than thirty lawsuits.
And the first wave to hit the courts haven’t gone Trump’s way.
In recent days, judges have pumped the brakes on Trump’s efforts to freeze spending, cull the federal workforce, end automatic citizenship for children born on U.S. soil, send transgender women to men’s prisons, access federal payment systems, and dismantle the United States Agency for International Development.
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"It has become ever more apparent that to our president the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals," U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said on Thursday when he extended an order he had issued two weeks ago temporarily blocking Trump from curtailing birthright citizenship.
“The rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain," Coughenour said.
But such comments don’t mean Trump won’t ultimately win or won’t cause permanent changes even if he eventually loses some of his fights.
The freeze on foreign aid, for example, is already damaging the network of groups the federal government relies on to deliver overseas assistance, according to Scott R. Anderson, a former U.S. diplomat and government attorney now at the Brookings Institution.
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“That whole industry is getting crippled and may collapse,” he said.
But with Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate, opponents of Trump’s policies have few avenues outside of the courts to fight back.
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They're often launching those efforts in blue states like Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington where they’re more likely to get a friendly judge.
But the judge who on Friday temporarily blocked some parts of the administration's attempt to shut down USAID was appointed by Trump.
And Coughenour, the federal judge in Seattle who castigated Trump on Thursday, was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, another Republican.
Still, Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow with the conservative Heritage Foundation, said Coughenour’s rulings aren’t conservative.
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“I don’t think it means much of anything,” he said of the temporary pauses Coughenour and other judges have imposed. “Almost all of the judges involved in these cases, when you look at their records, are very liberal.”
Even if Trump gets some bad rulings in the district courts, von Spakovsky said, he will eventually win more than he loses – including any challenges that ultimately get decided by the Supreme Court.
"I just think we’ll end up winning in court, in the Supreme Court,” Trump told reporters after Coughenour’s first ruling to block the executive order limiting birthright citizenship. “I think we’re going to win that case. I look forward to winning it."
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White House says Trump tsunami is 'fully legal'
The Trump administration, in fact, believes it will prevail in all of the cases brought against the President's orders.
“Every action taken by the Trump-Vance administration is fully legal and compliant with federal law," Harrison Fields, principal deputy White House press secretary, said in a statement to USA TODAY.
"Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people, who overwhelmingly elected President Trump to secure the border, revitalize the economy, and restore common-sense policies.”
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Fields also said that by "resorting to lawsuits," Democrats are "gaslighting on the widely supported mission of DOGE," or the Department of Government Efficiency ordered up by Trump and run by tech billionaire Elon Musk and his young cadre of computer engineers.
"Slashing waste, fraud, and abuse, and becoming better stewards of the American taxpayer’s hard-earned dollars might be a crime to Democrats," Fields said, "but it’s not a crime in a court of law.”
Blocking Elon Musk's efforts 'to eviscerate the federal government'
DOGE and the Musk team's efforts to access the computer systems of numerous federal agencies are the focus of many of the legal pushback efforts.
Dozens of private-sector lawyers and public interest groups are mobilizing to fight DOGE in court, said Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), a union involved in bringing at least five of the lawsuits.
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"AFGE, working with these partners, believes that this litigation strategy will help federal employees and will help us push back on Musk's attempt to eviscerate the federal government," Sanghvi told USA TODAY on Friday.
"We don't normally talk publicly about the chance of success of these things," Sanghvi said. "But we know the law is in our favor on these cases. That's why we brought them."
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"It's clear the administration is violating the law," Sanghvi added, "on several different fronts in several different ways."
In a deal struck Wednesday night, the Treasury Department agreed not to give DOGE access to its payment systems while a judge hears arguments in a lawsuit alleging the Space X founder and major Trump campaign donor illegally searched them.
That was in response to a lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Washington, D.C. by employee unions and retirees, who said Treasury had violated privacy laws by giving Musk and DOGE “full access” to government payment records documenting everything from income tax payments to Social Security benefits and federal employee salaries.
A mixed legal record in Trump's first term
Trump’s record at the Supreme Court during his first administration was mixed.
It took the president three tries, for example, before the court approved a version of his ban on travel from specific nations, including five mainly Muslim countries.
Despite appointing three justices to the Supreme Court during his first term, Trump's administration had the worst record at the Supreme Court of any administration since at least the Roosevelt administration, according to data developed by law professors Rebecca Brown and Lee Epstein for a 2023 article published in Presidential Studies Quarterly.
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Von Spakovsky said Trump now has a better legal team than during his first term.
“They are much better prepared for this,” he said.
But Georgetown University of Law professor Steve Vladeck is skeptical the Supreme Court will give Trump the amount of power he’s claiming, despite the court’s “aggressive and controversial embrace of executive power” in recent years.
“These assertions are already faring poorly in the courts,” Vladeck wrote recently, “and I suspect the Supreme Court, or at least a majority thereof, will be as skeptical as lower courts have been.”
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Public interest lawyers are optimistic about the automatic, or birthright citizenship case, arguing that Trump's move to limit the practice goes against decades, if not centuries, of case law ? and the Constitution.
On Feb. 5, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland issued a nationwide preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
Boardman's order "will remain in effect until the lawsuit is resolved or the injunction is overturned by a higher court," lawyers Nicole Fink and Philip Sholts from Ogletree Deakins’ Immigration Practice Group wrote in an analysis of the ruling.
Boardman’s ruling, they said, stated that Trump’s executive order not only conflicted with the Fourteenth Amendment but "more than one hundred years of binding Supreme Court precedent, as well as the United States’ 250-year history of birthright citizenship."
The Trump administration has threatened legal action as well in response to those who would stand in Trump's way.
Ed Martin, who was appointed by Trump last month as U.S. attorney of the District of Columbia, warned this week that his office would pursue charges against "anyone who impedes" DOGE's work in trying to downsize and restructure the federal government.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Trump administration continues to lose in court. Will it last?