SCOTUS green lights Trumps wrecking ball

American Federation of Government Employees v. Trump has not received the media attention it deserves

(Jesse Collins via Unsplash)

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 largely upstaged. In American Federation, the Supreme Court reversed both the district court and the 9^th 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. In yet another no-reasons-given shadow docket ruling, the high court is 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 percent 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 Association;

· Cutting 70 percent 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 9^th 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 9^th Circuit identified other risks of dismantling the federal government, including:

· Proliferating food-borne disease;

· Perpetuating hazardous environmental conditions;

· Eviscerating disaster loan services for local businesses; and

· Drastically reducing the provision of healthcare and other services to our nation’s veterans.

They might have added that Trump is deliberately accelerating climate change; spreading preventable diseases like black lung, polio, and measles; and allowing real terrorist operations to bypass national security because Kristi Noem is too busy staging fake terror photo ops for Trump TV. Nonetheless, the 9^th Circuit agreed with the district court that the few concerns it listed were enough to pause the mass firings, at least temporarily.

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 agencies to wealthy corporate donors champing at the bit to privatize the federal government.

The high court protected Trump’s lawlessness. Again.

As Justice Jackson noted in her dissent, lifting the stay and disregarding the extensive findings of fact developed by the District Court and the 9^th Cir. Court of Appeals was the wrong decision, at the wrong moment. Considering the horrors that Trump has already unleashed, that was an understatement.

Under Stephen Miller’s direction, military tanks and masked ICE agents are swarming public parks, courts, and schools. They are raiding private homes, farms, and places of employment and worship. Operating as Trump’s gestapo, masked agents are grabbing brown people out of their beds, off commercial farms, and off soccer fields, leaving screaming children and spouses behind. Despite having committed no crimes, they are headed for inhumane detention centers and likely deportation to foreign gulags.

Republicans on the high court are well aware of these abuses, but have begun greenlighting them nonetheless. Last week, they ended nationwide injunctions, the main tool in federal district courts’ quivers to stop a rogue president, despite allowing them under the Biden administration. The week before that, they approved Trump’s plan to deport migrants to foreign gulags in war-torn countries, to hell with the 8^th Amendment. Query what role will be left for Congress, or the lower courts, when SCOTUS and Trump have finished their collusive handiwork.

The high court shares Trump’s contempt for the federal judiciary

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 columnist and 25+ year federal trial attorney specializing in 1^st and 14^th A defense. Her Substack, The Haake Take, is free.