WASHINGTON – Sham documents. Cherry-picked data. Flimsy logic.
Those were the recent condemnations of three federal judges in courtrooms sprawled across the country as they separately critiqued Trump administration explanations for some of the president’s expansive efforts to remake the federal government.
Judges tasked with the initial review of the more than 100 legal challenges to those efforts are not just considering the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s actions. Some are also calling out the administration when they think government lawyers have been playing fast and loose with the facts.
Their criticism could become an issue if any of the challenges reach the Supreme Court. During the first Trump administration, the court blocked the Commerce Department from including a question about citizenship on the 2020 census after finding the agency hadn’t been forthcoming about its motivation.
“Reasoned decisionmaking under the Administrative Procedure Act calls for an explanation for agency action,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 5-4 majority. “What was provided here was more of a distraction.”
Here’s a look at what happened this month:
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco Thursday delivered one of the most far-reaching court defeats in the administration’s efforts to gut the federal bureaucracy.
Alsup, appointed to the bench by former President Bill Clinton, ordered six federal agencies to reinstate tens of thousands of federal government probationary workers fired in recent weeks.
Alsup said the Justice Department tried to obfuscate that the White House had improperly ordered agencies to fire workers en masse.
“I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years and I know how we get at the truth, and you’re not helping me get at the truth,” Alsup said. “You’re giving me press releases, sham documents.”
He also scolded the government for the bogus boilerplate reason employees were given for their termination.
“It is a sad day when our government would fire some good employee and say it was based on performance when they know good and well that’s a lie,” he said.
A federal judge in Maryland likewise said Thursday he didn’t believe the government’s claim that the fired employees had been individually reviewed.
“On the record before the Court, this isn’t true,” wrote U.S. District Judge James K. Bredar, who was appointed to the bench by former President Barack Obama. “It is simply not conceivable that the Government could have conducted individualized assessments of the relevant employees in the relevant timeframe.”
After Alsup’s ruling, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the Bay Area judge of “attempting to unconstitutionally seize the power of hiring and firing from the executive branch.”
“If a federal district court judge would like executive powers, they can try and run for president themselves,” she said in a statement.
During a Wednesday hearing in Washington, D.C., about Trump’s ban on transgender troops in the military, Justice Department attorneys argued the courts should defer to military leaders’ judgment on the issue.
But U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, appointed to the bench by former President Joe Biden, said the evidence offered to support that judgment mischaracterized data, including a 2021 military report.
“Should I defer to the military experts who cherry-picked one part of this study, misrepresented even that and ignored the rest of it and ignored the obvious import of it?” she asked.
The Defense Department had highlighted the fact that the study found 40% of transgender servicemembers were non-deployable at some point during a one-year period.
That figure is meaningless, Reyes said, because there was no comparison offered to the deployment rate of servicemembers overall.
Jason Manion, a Justice Department attorney, said that the 40% figure was relevant and Reyes was not supposed to second-guess the professional judgment of military leaders.
“Under the case law, you defer to the military,” he said. “You do not reassess the evidence.”
Last Monday, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled that the Constitution doesn’t allow Trump to sit on funds Congress directed be spent on humanitarian assistance and other foreign aid.
Ali, who was appointed to the bench in Washington, D.C., by Biden, also said there was no “rational connection” between the administration’s desire to scrutinize the programs and the immediate spending freeze.
“Defendants have yet to offer any explanation, let alone one supported by the record, for why a blanket suspension setting off a shockwave and upending reliance interests for thousands of businesses and organizations around the country was a rational precursor to reviewing programs,” Ali wrote.
Although the administration countered that the State Department exempted some programs from the freeze, Ali said the “record belies the assertion that the waivers provided any meaningful relief.”
Although the judge ordered the administration to pay for aid work already completed by contractors and foreign assistance groups, he did not require the government to restart canceled contracts. Ali said that while the administration had to spend funds Congress appropriated, the State Department has discretion about how to do so.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday said the administration has permanently ended 83% of the programs that had been run by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Rubio called that an “overdue and historic reform.”
The administration will have many more chances to make its case as litigation continues and could find a more receptive audience for Trump’s expansive view of presidential authority among the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority.
But if any of these cases or others arrive before the high court, Roberts could be on the lookout for “contrived reasons” as he was in 2019 when he blocked the citizenship question on the Census noting his logic: “Altogether, the evidence tells a story that does not match the explanation.”
