A sweeping executive action sowing confusion across the nation. The cry of “Wait, he can’t do that!” from constitutional lawyers and the political opposition. A swift ruling from a federal judge temporarily restoring trillions of dollars in federal assistance programs that have now been thrust into legal limbo.
Welcome to a Tuesday in the new Trump administration.
Early indications are that this is a feature, not a bug, of the new conservatism Donald Trump has ushered into the White House. Observers of the opening weeks of the new administration see a singular focus on flooding federal dockets with arguments that one man has the power to decide how things work in America — potentially in spite of specific measures put in place to prevent that from being the case.
The latest round of this came yesterday when a federal judge in D.C. temporarily stayed a sweeping order from the Office of Management and Budget aimed at freezing federal aid spending so Trump officials could review it to ensure no money was going to MAGA-targeted programs like “woke gender ideology.” The stay did not prevent the chaos, however, and the chaos is becoming the norm.
“It’s a stress test on our democratic institutions, our checks and balances, the guardrails that are in place. Federalism. Separation of powers. He’s testing it. He’s seeing how far he can go,” Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, told NOTUS. Bonta is one of the coalition of Democratic attorneys general he said are now in constant contact with each other, ready to push back on Trump’s designs on an expanded presidency.
“We will only get involved if the president violates the law or violates the Constitution,” Bonta said of the group. “And unfortunately, we’ve had to do that twice already.”
Before the confusion over whether the president could stop funding thousands of federal programs authorized by Congress came the confusion over whether he could unilaterally determine whether the 14th Amendment’s language on birthright citizenship didn’t apply to people born in the country to parents from somewhere else. A lawsuit by the Democratic AGs saw that order temporarily stayed by a federal judge in Seattle last week.
Among the dozens and dozens of other actions carrying Trump’s Sharpie-d signature were orders to fire independent inspectors general, remake the National Labor Relations Board and fire career prosecutors who happened to work on special counsel investigations into Trump. The response was exasperation — this stuff is not allowed, advocates for the affected government workers said, citing federal law that offers protections to civil service employees.
Trump’s firing of two Democratically-appointed members of the NLRB “is illegal and will have immediate consequences for working people,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement. One of the fired NLRB members, Gwynne Wilcox, indicated shortly after the news of her dismissal broke that she would challenge the administration in court. “We fully expect she will succeed in the courts and be restored to her position,” Shuler said.
There is now a life cycle to these especially novel Trump executive actions: surprise, confusion, then uncertainty about the future as Trump’s orders pile up against the guardrails. Bonta and his fellow AGs can only take things to court, he said. The rest he sees as part of the Trump administration’s plan.
“That memo from the Office of Management and Budget could have been surgical and tight and narrow and specific. It was none of those things,” Bonta said. “The chaos, it’s like a chilling effect, it gives this other layer of impact beyond the official conduct.”
Bonta said he was prepared for this kind of pressure on the system from Trump, but many political observers have stood agape at how quickly bipartisan conversations around “executive overreach” have become one-sided.
“It’s a very dramatic time,” Craig Green, a professor of law and government at Temple University, told NOTUS. “The kind of thing that many experts hoped wouldn’t happen. But it is happening.” Green, like other longtime observers of power in Washington reached in recent days, expects slog through the courts. But “immediate political shock waves,” he added.
Democrats have a word for these moves by the new president. “It’d be good if the attorney general were to tell the president, ‘This is illegal,’” Sen. Mazie Hirono said. “He can’t just on his own stop what Congress has already voted on.”
Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, declared Tuesday’s chaos over the OMB “a constitutional crisis.”
Republicans in Congress have a completely different take. “I don’t have a problem with it,” House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole said of the OMB directive that effectively tied the purse strings he constitutionally controls.
Ignoring traditional guardrails is becoming a national practice for Cole’s party. In Oklahoma, the GOP-led State Board of Education voted to require parents of public school students to prove their citizenship when enrolling, despite rules requiring public schools to provide an education to every child. That move seems destined for court as well.
“The extreme decision is not only a direct violation of the rights and freedoms of Oklahomans, but also a clear attempt to instill terror in communities across the state,” Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at the National Immigration Law Center, said in a statement.
The White House is defiant. The official take is essentially that past presidents simply didn’t realize the power that they had before Trump used it. “He’s the executive of the executive branch, and therefore, he has the power to fire anyone within the executive branch that he wishes to,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters Tuesday at her first official briefing on the job. She was responding to a question about the firing of career prosecutors, who legally cannot be fired without cause.
Leavitt said the White House counsel said Trump’s actions were legal, an answer that served as a shorthand for the general White House position toward shaken constitutionalists and Democrats.
“We believe that we will win in court,” she said, vowing Tuesday that the White House will argue the legality of its actions all the way up to the nation’s highest court if it has to.
How to fight Trump now enters the ongoing conversation about the future of Democratic Party tactics in the wake of the election. Some advocates warn the Supreme Court could be a wild card in the fight to uphold the commonly accepted view of the Constitution and the presidency.
“I think we’ve probably got four votes,” Joe Jacobson, the president of Progress Action Fund, told NOTUS. “The question is, who else can we get? Where’s [Justice Neil] Gorsuch at?”
Jacobson said Democrats have to raise the alarm with the public. “We have to get the word out,” he said, calling for the party to focus on how to use modern media channels to make esoteric laws around the firing of federal employees break through. “We can’t do it like we have always done it,” he said.
Jacobson took a victory lap of sorts Tuesday after the president’s orders appeared to lead to the Medicaid portal crashing and confusion about federal health care assistance. (The White House said the crash was being addressed.) The group was known for 2024 ads aimed at scaring voters with edgy messaging warning a Republican victory would put partisan ideology ahead of access to medical help.
What actually manifested Tuesday was well beyond his expectations.
“It’s a shit show, 100%,” Jacobson said. “To say it mildly.”
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Evan McMorris-Santoro is a reporter at NOTUS. Ben T.N. Mause, a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow, contributed to this report.
