President Donald Trump’s effort to reshape the federal government through a series of sweeping executive orders ran into a number of roadblocks in the courts this week, but he also scored a major legal victory.
While judges halted — at least temporarily — his administration’s moves to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, pause grants from the National Institutes of Health to almost two dozen states and other moves, another court allowed Trump’s massive “deferred resignation” program for federal employees to move forward.
The administration was also hit with a number of new legal challenges, including one alleging the Department of Government Efficiency, the Trump-created office headed by billionaire Elon Musk, is unconstitutional.
Here’s a look at the number of fast-moving developments from the past week and a glance at what’s to come.
Buyout plan moves forward
Trump’s biggest legal victory started off the week looking like an apparent loss in Boston federal court. U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. had extended his pause of the administration’s effort to push federal workers to resign after a hearing Monday where labor unions argued it would cause their members “irreparable harm.”
The unions alleged that the administration did not have the legal authority to offer the “rushed” buyouts.
Two days after the hearing, O’Toole dissolved his temporary restraining order, finding the unions lacked standing to bring the challenge. “The unions do not have the required direct stake” in the buyout plan and “are challenging a policy that affects others, specifically executive branch employees. This is not sufficient,” the judge ruled.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt praised the ruling and called it “the first of many legal wins for the President.”
Judge further halts effort to dismantle USAID
The federal judge in Washington, D.C., who last week paused a deadline to strip down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, to a few hundred employees from a workforce of more than 5,000 indicated he had concerns about plaintiffs’ standing in that case at a hearing Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols questioned how employees were being irreparably harmed and why their claims couldn’t be handled through normal avenues for federal employees to bring employment-related claims.
“The claim plaintiffs have here is this agency is being dismantled in an unconstitutional and unlawful manner in excess of the executive’s authority,” said Karla Gilbride, a lawyer for the unions suing the agency. Justice Department lawyer Eric Hamilton insisted the agency isn’t being dismantled and called the union’s arguments “a straw man.”
Nichols pressed Hamilton for what steps the government was taking to ensure the safety of workers overseas, and directed him to submit information in writing about what actions were being taken. The judge extended his temporary restraining order for another week while he weighs how to proceed with the union’s request for a longer injunction.
A DOGE Day Afternoon
Musk’s newly created DOGE was the subject of three hearings in two different courthouses Friday afternoon.
One of the hearings was in federal court in Manhattan, where U.S. District Judge Jeanette Vargas extended a restraining order barring DOGE staffers from accessing sensitive personal data on Treasury department servers.
The plaintiffs in the case, a coalition of states, are seeking a longer term preliminary injunction restricting DOGE’s access. “I am going to reserve decision on the preliminary injunction decision. I will have it soon,” the judge said.
A judge in D.C. heard similar arguments involving DOGE’s access to Dept. of Education records and made a similar ruling. U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss left in place an order restricting DOGE from accessing sensitive information systems until at least Monday, when he said he expects to issue a decision on the issue.
The other case was also in D.C., where U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump’s election interference prosecution, heard arguments from a coalition of states seeking an order declaring that DOGE is unlawful. The states want an order essentially barring the “unconstitutional” office from taking any further disruptive action.
Chutkan expressed deep skepticism that the states had shown the imminent and irreparable harm that would warrant an order stopping all of DOGE’s work. “What you’re essentially asking me to do is temporarily halt the functioning of the government,” the judge said.
Although she appeared disinclined to grant the restraining order, Chutkan asked the states to file a more limited proposed order for her consideration by 5 p.m. Saturday.
Temporary reprieve for CFPB
A different D.C. judge’s ruling late Friday gave a temporary reprieve to the embattled Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s ruling bars mass firings at the agency and prevents the deletion of agency data pending a March 3 hearing on groups’ claims that acting CFPB director Russell Vought was working to essentially shut the agency down.
The actions taken by Vought and the Trump-run CFPB were “arbitrary, capricious, unconstitutional, and not in accordance with law,” the unions said in a court filing.
They had asked the judge to “declare unlawful and set aside the defendants’ actions and intended further actions to dismantle the CFPB.”
The judge’s decision noted the two sides had agreed to the pause, which she made official in her order.
Judge says Trump administration defying court order
On Monday, a federal judge in Rhode Island said that the Trump administration had violated his order halting a sweeping federal funding freeze.
U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell ordered the government to “immediately restore frozen funding” after the plaintiffs in the case, a coalition of 22 states, said the government had failed to resume funding in several programs.
It was the first time since Trump’s second inauguration that a judge has accused his administration of defying a court order.
McConnell issued his restraining order Jan. 31 after a wide-ranging Office of Management and Budget directive promoting Trump’s executive orders caused chaos and confusion across the country, with payment systems being temporarily shut down.
Foreign aid freeze temporarily halted
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Thursday signed off on a temporary restraining order blocking the administration’s blanket freeze on federal grant money to perform foreign assistance work.
Businesses and nonprofits that received the grants and disbursed the aid filed suit and provided “evidence detailing the devastating effects on American businesses and nonprofits, which have been forced to shut down programs, to furlough or lay off employees and in some instances to shutter altogether as a result of the challenged action,” U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali wrote.
“They have also provided supporting evidence that Defendants’ actions have had and will continue to have a catastrophic effect on the humanitarian missions of several plaintiffs,” the judge added.
The government countered “that some of the contracts terminated might have included clauses that allowed them to be terminated in certain circumstances, but also acknowledged that the approach taken was blanket and not limited to such contracts.” The judge found the groups had “met their burden for temporary, emergency relief.”
Judge halts NIH cuts
On Monday, a federal judge in Boston temporarily halted the Trump administration’s drastic changes to how and how much the National Institutes of Health pays for biomedical research.
The NIH announced last week it would limit indirect funding for research projects to 15%, slashing how much funding the federal government would provide to research agencies for things like equipment, maintenance, utilities and support staff. The unexpected immediate cuts were met with some bipartisan backlash across the country, and a group of 22 states with Democratic attorneys general challenged them in court, arguing the administration didn’t have the authority to make such cuts.
U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley signed off on a temporary restraining order blocking the cuts. Unlike in other actions that have been brought to date resulting in nationwide freezes, Kelley’s order only affects the 22 states that brought the suit. The judge is scheduled to hold a hearing in the case on Feb. 21.
Judge orders administration to restore scrubbed health data
U.S. District Judge John D. Bates of Washington, D.C., ordered the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Food and Drug Administration to restore health-related webpages and datasets that had been taken down in an effort to comply with Trump’s executive order cracking down on “gender ideology.”
The information that was removed included a number of pages about HIV prevention and emergency contraception, information about transgender people and gay and bisexual men and suggestions on how to develop clinical trials.
The nonprofit Doctors for America filed suit to get the pages restored, arguing its members “use the webpages regularly in treating patients and conducting research.” Bates granted their request for a temporary restraining order, finding, “If those doctors cannot provide these individuals the care they need (and deserve) within the scheduled and often limited time frame, there is a chance that some individuals will not receive treatment, including for severe, life-threatening conditions.”
Transgender health care ban frozen
On Thursday, a federal judge in Maryland temporarily blocked for at least two weeks Trump’s executive order aimed at restricting transgender health care for anyone under 19.
A suit brought on behalf of two transgender young adults who are 18 and five families of trans minors argued the order, which threatened to cut off federal funding for hospitals and health care providers who perform transition-related care for minors, is unlawful. After the order was issued, hospitals in New York City; Colorado; Virginia; Illinois; Pennsylvania; Washington, D.C.; and Los Angeles announced that they were suspending or reviewing their transition-related care for people under 19.
The suit charges that Trump can’t make the financial determinations — only Congress can. The government argued Thursday that the order is not a nationwide ban on care and is only a “general policy directive.”
“I don’t know how you can credibly argue that this is not demanding the cessation of funding for gender-affirming care,” the judge responded. “In this situation, it is clear that these plaintiffs have received phone calls stopping their care, stopping their appointments, stopping their everything.”
Another loss for birthright citizenship
At a hearing Monday, a federal judge in New Hampshire became the third to block Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
U.S. District Judge Joseph N. Laplante said he would issue a preliminary injunction blocking the order from taking effect. The order, which is being challenged in at least nine lawsuits, attempts to limit birthright citizenship to people who have at least one parent who is a United States citizen or permanent resident.
Judges in Seattle and Maryland had previously blocked the directive, finding it violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
More challenges on the way
The administration was also hit with several new lawsuits this week challenging Trump’s directives.
Musk’s DOGE has been the target of numerous suits, including the one filed Thursday on behalf of 14 states seeking to have it declared unlawful.
On Tuesday, a group of Christian and Jewish religious organizations filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C., challenging the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to rescind guidance barring immigration raids at or near places of worship except in emergency situations or with prior written, high-level supervisory approval.
On Wednesday, a coalition of immigrant rights groups filed suit in Washington, D.C., district court over the administration’s policy of sending immigrants from the interior of the United States to Guantanamo Bay. The suit charges the immigrants are being denied their right to a lawyer.
