Battle Against Trump-DOGE Overhaul to Play Out in Select Courts

Lawsuits against the Trump administration have put four US courts with a majority of Democrat-appointed judges at the center of fights over the onslaught of executive actions roiling the US government.

In the first four weeks of the new administration, at least 74 lawsuits were filed, and of those, 58 were brought in federal district courts in Washington, Boston, Seattle and suburban Maryland, according to a Bloomberg News analysis. Each of those districts has a majority of active judges nominated by Democratic presidents and each feeds into appeals courts with a similar ideological balance.

The cases have challenged President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration policies, efforts to slash the size and reach of federal agencies and roll back civil rights protections and diversity programs. Others have focused on Tesla Inc. and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and its constitutionality and access to agency computer systems.

“Advocates will want to go to places that they perceive to be more sympathetic,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School senior lecturer and retired Boston federal judge who was nominated by former President Bill Clinton.

With courts as key players in political fights, the strategy behind where challengers file takes on new significance — and scrutiny. But the cases against Trump and his appointees are more spread out across districts and circuits compared to the flurry of cases brought by conservatives against Joe Biden’s administration, according to legal scholars tracking such actions. Trump’s opponents also haven’t turned to single-judge divisions, a move that can ensure predictability in who hears a case.

17 Judges

So far, at least 17 judges — including several appointed by Republicans — have orders in place blocking or temporarily halting actions by Trump’s administration.

Those include initiatives to restrict birthright citizenship, suspend or cut off domestic and foreign US spending, shrink the federal workforce, oust independent agency heads and roll back legal protections and medical care for transgender adults and youths. In other cases, the administration has agreed to a pause to give judges time to rule, another way that legal fights are forcing a slowdown.

Demonstrators hold signs during a rally for federal workers in Washington, DC.

Photographer: Tierney L. Cross/Bloomberg

Advocacy groups and Democratic attorneys general have declined to talk publicly about their strategy when it comes to where they’re suing the Trump administration. Skye Perryman, chief executive of Democracy Forward, which has filed multiple lawsuits, pointed to the range of rulings to date from judges in different courts and circuits.

“So many of the actions are outside the bounds of even reasonable disagreement on the rule of law,” Perryman said.

Spokespeople for the White House and the US Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.

Half in Washington

Of the 74 cases filed as of Friday, more than half are in the nation’s capital. Litigants have to show a reason for filing in a particular court and Washington has long been the primary forum for lawsuits against federal agencies and White House policies. In some instances, US law requires cases against the government to be filed there.

But coalitions of Democratic attorneys general also have been splitting up cases across their home states. Advocacy groups and federal worker unions have been filing where they’re based or where they have clients and members.

The E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse in Washington, DC.

Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg

Cases in Washington get appealed to the DC Circuit, while those in Boston, Maryland and Seattle go to the 1st, 4th and 9th Circuits, respectively. Republican state officials and conservative groups routinely brought lawsuits against the Biden administration in districts in the conservative-leaning 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

During Trump’s first term, the DC, 4th and 9th Circuits handed him a number of high-profile losses, especially on immigration issues. The 1st Circuit didn’t play as prominent a role. Gertner said it historically had a reputation as a moderate bench. The circuit’s six active judgeships are filled with five Democrat appointees and one vacancy for Trump to potentially fill.

Musk Attacks

Trump’s allies have lashed out at judges in response, including attacks by Trump’s billionaire ally Musk and Vice President JD Vance. During Trump’s first term, his criticism of judges who ruled against him drew a rare public rebuke from Chief Justice John Roberts, who defended the judiciary’s independence.

Federal judges push back on the idea that the party of the president who appointed them is a predictor, let alone a factor, in how they’ll rule. They point to their lifetime tenure, conflict of interest laws and ethics rules as bulwarks against politically-motivated decision-making, though the latter is only binding on lower courts, not the US Supreme Court.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and JD Vance

Source: Justin Merriman/Bloomberg

Still, Katherine Macfarlane, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law and an expert in federal court civil procedure, said that in politically charged cases, at least some amount of “macro” strategy around where to file has become standard.

Political protections like life tenure haven’t “been enough to give parties confidence that it doesn’t matter who you’re in front of,” she said.

At the district court level, complaints about the tactic known as “judge shopping” escalated during the Biden administration, when conservatives brought a noticeable proportion of cases in Texas divisions where only one or two judges were sitting.

‘Forum Shopping’

Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who has researched judge shopping and was critical of the practice during the Biden years, said that hasn’t been a hallmark of Trump challengers so far.

“Is there forum-shopping? Sure. Is it anything close to what was happening over the past four years? No,” Vladeck said.

Earlier this week, the chief judge of the Massachusetts federal court released a new policy that lawsuits filed in the district’s single-judge divisions in Springfield and Worcester seeking nationwide relief against US government policies would be randomly assigned across the entirety of the bench. To date, though, challenges to the Trump administration have been filed in Boston.

Gertner, a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, said the wave of pushback from judges pausing or blocking the Trump administration’s actions was a sign that the location of these fights might not prove a significant factor in the outcomes. She cited the example of the four judges — two appointed by Republicans and two by Democrats — who have ruled against Trump’s birthright citizenship limits.

“The distance between what Trump is doing and what the law requires and what the Constitution requires is so substantial that it doesn’t matter what the judge is,” she said.

--With assistance from Christopher Cannon.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Zoe Tillman in Washington at ztillman2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net