As the death toll rises in Texas, Trump has done everything but tap dance naked to deflect the media from discussing climate change (hoax), or how his staff cuts to the National Weather Service (600 cuts in May) likely affected flood warnings.
So it is understandable that in the clickbait environment of today’s media, the significance of Tuesday’s American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump decision was upstaged. In American Federation, the Supreme Court reversed both the district court and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and granted Trump’s request to dramatically restructure the federal government even while the cases challenging it are pending.
Although agency-specific plans were not before the Court, American Federation allows Trump’s unilateral destruction of federal agencies to continue without Congressional input. It’s another no-reasons-given shadow docket ruling allowing Trump to trash Congressional mandates through executive fiat.
SCOTUS defends another Executive Order that endangers lives
In February, Trump issued Executive Order No. 14210 to “eliminate” major components of the federal government. The rub is that most of the components Trump seeks to eliminate were established through acts of Congress.
In its underlying decision, the district court wrote a 51-page opinion detailing just a few of Trump’s restructuring plans, which included:
- Cutting 93% of employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health;
- Firing half the workforce at the Department of Energy;
- Firing more than half the workforce of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration;
- Cutting 70% of the staff at the Department of Labor Headquarters, and
- Cutting 83,000 workers at the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Trump’s team argued that this was an appropriate exercise of “existing executive-branch authority to make staffing decisions,” rather than a fundamental takedown of the federal government. But any American who watched DOGE take a chainsaw to federal agencies, without first bothering to learn what those agencies did, knows better.
Lives lost won’t be limited to weather-related calamities
Well before Texas floods showed the danger of blindly dismantling federal services, the 9th Circuit court of appeals affirmed the district court’s injunction to preliminarily stop Trump’s wrecking ball until the cases challenging it could be heard on the merits.
Issuing its own 35-page ruling, the 9th Circuit identified other risks of dismantling the federal government like proliferating food-borne disease and spreading hazardous environmental conditions.
These concerns are of no moment to Trump, who ordered his cabinet to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.” As Project 2025 prescribes, Trump will now fire more career civil servants with deep subject matter expertise. He will either replace them with know-nothing loyalists, or farm out their jobs to corporate donors champing at the bit to privatize the federal government.
The high court protected Trump’s lawlessness. Again.
Disregarding the evidence and decisions of both the district and appellate courts, the Supreme Court wholly disregarded 69 sworn declarations and 1,400 pages of evidence in the underlying case. They also disregarded long-standing Supreme Court precedent directing that stays pending appeal should only be granted in “extraordinary circumstances.”
Without offering any review at all of the case from the district court, the majority summarily wrote that, “the Government is likely to succeed on its argument that the Executive Order and Memorandum are lawful,” without explaining how or why Trump’s power grab EO would survive a merits review. Justice Sotomayor, for her part, concurred only because Trump’s Executive Order directs agencies to plan reductions in force “consistent with applicable law,” entitling Trump the benefit of the doubt until he breaks the law. Again.
As Justice Jackson’s dissent put it, “What one person (or President) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer’s prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner’s chance to breathe free from black lung, or a preschooler’s opportunity to learn in a safe environment.”
The bottom line for Jackson was that Trump’s wrecking ball is aimed at agencies and policy choices Congress made, but without Congressional consent. She allows that, while presidents have the authority to manage the executive branch, “our system does not allow the President to re-write laws on his own under the guise of that authority.”
American Federation will deliver long term consequences, as yet unseen, for both Congress and the federal judiciary. Although MAGA Republicans groveling before Trump divested themselves of power willingly, the rest of Congress did not. Arrogating legislative powers for himself through 170 largely lawless EOs to date, Trump will diminish the role of Congress until it is nearly meaningless.
The federal judiciary has also been weakened. Query how federal district and appellate court judges must feel, knowing that their life’s work — their trained distillations of facts in evidence and analyses of binding precedent — are now worthless exercises awaiting shadow docket reversal by a partisan and demonstrably corrupt high court.
Sabrina Haake is a 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1st and 14th A defense. Her columns are published in Alternet, Chicago Tribune, MSN, Out South Florida, Raw Story, Salon, Smart News and Windy City Times. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.
