With countless legal challenges to the Trump administration’s federal spending actions, legal experts say plaintiffs in these suits are attempting to block President Donald Trump’s agenda as the courts navigate conceivably new territory.
“I think this is a continuation of the warfare that we’ve seen over the past four-plus years during the Biden administration,” Zack Smith, Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Fox News Digital.
“The only difference now is that the instigators of the lawfare are outside of government, and they’re trying to use different advocacy groups, different interest groups to try to throw up obstructions to Donald Trump’s actions.”
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The Trump administration so far has become the target of more than 90 lawsuits since the start of the president’s second term, many of which are challenging the president’s directives. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The Trump administration so far has become the target of more than 90 lawsuits since the start of the president’s second term, many of which are challenging the president’s directives.
Plaintiffs ranging from blue state attorneys general to advocacy and interest groups are specifically challenging Trump’s federal spending actions, including the administration’s attempt to halt federal funding to various programs and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) efforts to slash excess government spending.
Smith said he suspects these plaintiffs are attempting to “slow down” the Trump administration’s progress and agenda via these lawsuits “even if they know or suspect their lawsuits will ultimately not be successful.”
UC Berkeley Law Professor John Yoo told Fox News Digital that the plaintiffs in the spending cases are showing “political weakness” by seeking judicial recourse rather than going to Congress.
“I think that what you’re seeing is political weakness, because, if they had popular support, they should go to Congress,” Yoo said. “That’s the branch for which the Founders expected to be responsible in containing or reacting to any expansion of presidential power that went too far.”
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Despite the public outcry from conservatives that judges blocking Trump’s federal spending actions are “activist judges,” Yoo said the judges are “confused.”
“There’s a lot of confusion going on in the lower courts,” he said. “I think they misunderstand their proper role.”
Smith said that in the cases at hand, many judges are “interposing their own views of what [are] appropriate actions for the executive branch of government,” saying this is “not the proper role of a judge.”
Plaintiffs ranging from blue state attorneys general to advocacy and interest groups are specifically challenging Trump’s federal spending actions. (Leigh Green for Fox News Digital)
“And yet you see some of these judges who are issuing these TROs, they’re being very aggressive, and they’re impeding on core executive branch functions when it really should be the president and his advisers who get to make important decisions,” Smith said.
Smith added he hopes the Supreme Court is “taking a skeptical eye towards some of these actions by these judges.”
Both Smith and Yoo said they expect these challenges to eventually make their way up to the Supreme Court, with Smith saying the high court “is going to have to confront some questions that it’s been trying to skirt for several years now.”
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“This has to go to the Supreme Court because you’re seeing confusion in the lower courts about what is the proper procedural way to challenge spending freezes,” Yoo said.
On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts paused a federal judge’s order that required the Trump administration to pay around $2 billion in foreign aid funds to contractors by midnight. Smith called the move by Roberts “actually pretty stunning.”
Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday paused a federal judge’s order that required the Trump administration to pay around $2 billion in foreign aid funds to contractors by midnight. (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)
“And I think a reasonable interpretation of that would be that the justices, particularly the Chief Justice, is kind of sending a shot across the bow to some of these judges that, ‘Look, if you keep this up, we’re going to step in and intervene,’” Smith said.
Yoo said he expects the Trump administration to ultimately prevail on many of the suits launched against him, saying that “he’s really, in many ways, following the decisions of the Roberts Court itself about how far executive power goes.”
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“Now, just because Trump won an election doesn’t mean he gets to do whatever he wants — he has to achieve his mandate through constitutional processes, which I think he’s doing,” Yoo said.
“He’s litigating, he’s appearing at the Supreme Court, so he’s not ignoring the courts. He’s doing what you should do if you’re the president and you have the responsibility to execute the law,” Yoo continued.
Fox News Digital’s Bradford Betz contributed to this report.
