President Trump’s breakneck attack on the federal government has faced a barrage of lawsuits, with judges increasingly intervening to tell his administration to stop, for now, what it is doing on a range of fronts.
At least 70 lawsuits have been filed against the Trump administration, and judges have issued at least 14 orders blocking actions. Additional rulings proliferate every day. While only short-term measures for now, their practical effect has been to slow Mr. Trump’s stride — as he acknowledged on Tuesday when asked if he would obey the decisions.
“I always abide by the courts, and then I’ll have to appeal it,” he said at the White House. “But then what he’s done is he’s slowed down the momentum. And it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books.”
To be sure, all of the orders are at this stage merely temporary. Their purpose is to keep things in place the way they were before Mr. Trump’s disruptions, buying time for courts to more fully consider the legal arguments at hand.
That means the judicial branch may ultimately allow Mr. Trump to move forward with many of his policies. Perhaps a district court judge will decide that the president did have lawful authority to act, or an appeals court or the Supreme Court — where Republican appointees have a supermajority — will permit him to proceed.
Indeed, on Wednesday evening, a judge in Boston lifted a temporary restraining order that he had issued last week to pause a deferred resignation program aimed at nudging federal workers to quit voluntarily. The labor unions that brought the challenge, the judge said, had not been sufficiently harmed by the program to sue.
It was a victory for Mr. Trump. Still, that case has been relatively weak compared with many of the others because it is hard to point to anyone who is clearly hurt by a voluntary program, and only people specifically harmed by an action have standing to bring lawsuits against it.
By contrast, the judicial opinions accompanying many of the other orders binding the Trump administration’s hands have often indicated that there is reason to believe the plaintiffs may ultimately prevail.
And their cumulative weight is starting to thwart the strategy that Mr. Trump and his team — including the billionaire Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency — have pursued: to move quickly, everywhere, all at once.
The president’s comments from the Oval Office on Tuesday appeared to refer to a particular set of orders by a federal judge in Rhode Island, John J. McConnell Jr. He has directed agencies, for now, to unfreeze more than a trillion dollars in federal grants, loans and other spending that the White House had blocked via a memo that it has since rescinded.
A day earlier, Judge McConnell doubled down on his order after receiving evidence that some agencies were still blocking funds, and an appeals court denied the Trump administration’s request to halt his directive.
But in another victory for the administration, the judge on Tuesday clarified that his order did not apply to pausing a federally run program that helps New York cover the cost of sheltering migrants in hotels, since the government has specific concerns that the funds were being mismanaged. The judge said if the government has a separate legal basis to withhold particular funds unrelated to the policy applying a blanket freeze, it may proceed.
Still, in the past week or so, a judge blocked Mr. Trump’s appointees and associates of Mr. Musk’s cost-cutting initiative from gaining access to a sensitive Treasury Department payments system. Another reinstated, for now, a government ethics watchdog Mr. Trump had fired. Yet another barred sending certain Venezuelan migrants to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
One judge ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to restore website pages it had deleted under Mr. Trump’s executive order barring any references to race, gender identity or sexual orientation. Another instructed the National Institutes of Health to halt a plan to cut $4 billion in funding for research at universities, cancer centers and hospitals.
A judge stopped the administration from placing 2,200 workers for the U.S. Agency for International Development on administrative leave. And another prohibited the government from releasing the names of F.B.I. agents who had investigated Jan. 6 rioters.
Last week, two judges — one in Maryland, the other in Washington — issued preliminary injunctions blocking Mr. Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrants, escalating earlier restraining orders against the policy.
Numerous other requests for orders are pending. On Wednesday alone, a group of inspectors general whom Mr. Trump fired — without following a law requiring advance notice to Congress — sued, asking a judge to declare their dismissals illegal and order their reinstatement. And a group of immigration lawyers sued to be granted access to migrants Mr. Trump sent to the Guantánamo military base.
Mr. Trump’s aggression in violating statutes — from job protections for various officials to a statute that says U.S.A.I.D. shall exist as an independent entity — has suggested his team may be setting up test cases in the hope that the Supreme Court will eventually strike down those laws as unconstitutional constraints on his power.
If so, that would be a good reason to obey lower-court orders so as not to irritate the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., in his 2024 year-end report, acknowledged that courts occasionally get things wrong, but called out “threats to defy lawfully entered judgments” as illegitimate and a peril to judicial independence and the rule of law.
In the past few years, he said, “elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings.” Such suggestions, he said, were dangerous, and “must be soundly rejected.”
But Mr. Trump is also trying to get things done now. So it remains to be seen whether his patience will wear thin if the orders keep accumulating, like the tiny Lilliputians’ tethers that ultimately tied down a sleeping Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels.”
Over the weekend, Vice President JD Vance fired a warning shot at the judiciary in a post on social media, declaring, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” It is “illegal” for courts to unduly interfere in executive branch decisions, he added.
Mr. Vance stopped short of asserting that Mr. Trump should ignore court orders that he decides violate his own understanding of the powers the Constitution exclusively assigns to presidents. But before becoming vice president, Mr. Vance explicitly and repeatedly called for Mr. Trump to do so if he returned to office.
Against that backdrop, Mr. Trump’s insistence that “I always abide by the courts” as he appeared alongside Mr. Musk in the Oval Office on Tuesday was significant. But the president, who has publicly attacked judges who have ruled against him, also offered what appeared to be a veiled threat.
“We want to weed out the corruption, and it seems hard to believe that a judge could say ‘we don’t want you to do that,’” he said. “So, maybe we have to look at the judges because that’s a very serious — I think it’s a very serious violation.”
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