Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times, often agreeing with plaintiffs that agency decision-making is arbitrary and capricious.
By Fred Barbash and Fred Barbash Law, constitution and courts Email Bio Follow Deanna Paul Deanna Paul Reporter covering national and breaking news Email Bio Follow March 19 at 12:05 PM Federal judges have ruled against the Trump administration at least 63 times over the past two years, an extraordinary record of legal defeat that has stymied large parts of the president’s agenda on the environment, immigration and other matters.
“What they have consistently been doing is short-circuiting the process,” said Georgetown Law School’s William Buzbee, an expert on administrative law who has studied Trump’s record. In the regulatory cases, Buzbee said, “They don’t even come close” to explaining their actions, “making it very easy for the courts to reject them because they’re not doing their homework.”
Some errors are so basic that Jaffe said he has to wonder whether agency officials are more interested in announcing policy shifts than in actually implementing them. “It’s not just that they’re losing. But they’re being so nuts about it,” he said, adding that the losses in court have “set regulatory reform back for a period of time.”
Democratic appointees, many of them tapped by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, are responsible for 45 decisions. Republican appointees dating back to President Ronald Reagan issued the other rulings. Magistrate judges, who are not appointed by presidents, made three of the decisions. Michael Bars, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which handles determinations for temporary protected status, declined to comment on ongoing litigation. He added that the agency is committed to “faithfully executing the law.”
The decision was taken — abruptly and without explanation — soon after the June 2017 appointment of Valerie Huber to serve as senior adviser to then-HHS Secretary Tom Price. Huber, a leader of the abstinence-only sex education movement — which she prefers to call “sexual risk avoidance” — had lobbied to eliminate funding for the programs, which, in her view, “normalized teen sex.”
“This much is clear: A federal agency that changes course abruptly without a well-reasoned explanation for its decision or that acts contrary to its own regulations is subject to having a federal court vacate its action as ‘arbitrary [and] capricious,’ ” she said in her ruling, quoting the APA’s most recognizable incantation.
“Certainly, different administrations may implement different regulatory priorities,” Norton wrote in August. But the law “ ‘requires that the pivot from one administration’s priorities to those of the next be accomplished with at least some fidelity to law and legal process.’ . . . The court cannot countenance such a state of affairs,” he wrote.
Compounding the problem was the Trump team’s “complete distrust of the career staff” at the EPA, Holmstead said — a professional corps that “always gives you good advice whether or not they agree” with the president’s politics.
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