(Dec. 23) Get ready for a maelstrom in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency.
If he and his associates follow up on all their policy and procedural promises — or threats, depending on your perspective — they could put the federal government through unprecedented uncertainty and legal fights. Possible statutory and constitutional challenges to some of Trump’s agenda items could be multitudinous and serious. Without prejudging their merits or those of the objections to them, but just to outline the possible coming contretemps, here are some subjects that could be in legal dispute.
The Ramaswamy-Musk DOGE approach
Tycoons Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will head a nonstatutory outside commission dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (although it is not an actual department of the federal goverment) that aims to eliminate wasteful spending and redundant functions, massively cut staff, and save costs. The goals, in general, are salutary, but the methods need to be legal and sensible.
As the two DOGE leaders described their plan in a Nov. 20 newspaper column, however, they are inviting major legal challenges. The two principal laws or sets of laws governing the federal bureaucracy are civil service acts and the Administrative Procedure Act. In their column, the DOGE duo propose end-runs around both, the former tacitly and the latter explicitly.
To do so, they adopt highly disputed interpretations of a lengthy list of Supreme Court cases. From two cases, Franklin v. Massachusetts (1992) and Collins v. Yellen (2021), they assert that the president enjoys sweeping, unilateral authority, without the necessity of congressional action, to achieve massive reductions in personnel. From two more, in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), they assert that Trump, on his own and retroactively, and apparently without case-by-case court decisions, can immediately “pause” and essentially “nullif[y] thousands … of regulations.”…. [There are a whole lot of other legal fights brewing. Follow this link for more!]
