When the White House issued a memo in late September directing federal agencies to plan for mass layoffs instead of furloughs during a government shutdown, a group of lawyers representing federal worker unions was ready.
“Once we saw the memo, all of us sort of huddled to figure out what we should do because it was clearly on its face, there were issues,” recalled Rushab Sanghvi, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees.
AFGE had been working with a number of other law firms and legal groups in challenges against the Trump administration. So by the time the memo hit, they knew how’d they would move forward to get a lawsuit together.
“We’re literally in communication every day, and so, when this came out, we talked about this,” Sanghvi said.
President Donald Trump’s White House has pushed to redefine legal precedent in the president’s favor. Outside legal groups were coordinating months before Trump was even elected to prepare for what they anticipated was to come. There have been over 450 legal challenges to the president’s policies in the first nine months of Trump’s second administration, and more than 140 cases have led to rulings at least in part blocking them, according to analysis by the law and policy journal Just Security.
NOTUS spoke to attorneys from six organizations that have been involved in challenging the Trump administration in court. During Trump’s first term, some of the strongest backstops against his agenda were people inside the administration itself. Trump has purged dissent from his cabinet this term and resistance to Trump in Congress is virtually non-existent. The groups say the last real way for Democrats and others to attempt to stop the president is in federal court.
Since January, federal judges have blocked many of the administration’s actions, such as mass layoffs of the federal workforce, Trump’s birthright citizenship restrictions, its attempt to repurpose disaster mitigation funds and its effort to cut funding to hospitals that offer gender-affirming care. (Though the Supreme Court has reversed several lower court rulings.)
The avalanche of litigation is a result of months-long, and in some cases years-long, planning from different groups who worked in tandem to meet the moment.
“The first Trump administration was definitely a dress rehearsal,” said Craig Becker, managing counsel for affirmative litigation at Democracy Defenders Fund. “The president-elect made clear it was going to be different, and so the appetite for cooperation and helping one another was much greater this time around.”
In response to this story, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told NOTUS, “It’s not news that radical left-wing organizations are launching a coordinated effort to undermine the will of the American people.”
“Fortunately for America, the Trump Administration’s policies have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court,” Jackson continued. “The President will continue implementing the policy agenda that the American people voted for in November and will continue to be vindicated by higher courts when liberal activist judges and groups attempt to intervene. And much to the chagrin of these liberal organizations our winning will continue.”
Just days after Trump was elected in November, Becker recalled, the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest labor federation, convened a group of unions — AFGE and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees — and major litigation groups, including Democracy Defenders Funds, Democracy Forward, the American Civil Liberties Union and Public Citizen, to strategize ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
They met both in person and over Zoom. Those groups continue to be in constant communication.
They met “to share research, to share strategy, to try to develop the relationships that we knew were going to be necessary as the Trump administration started to implement its plans,” Becker said.
“We predicted much of what was going to happen,” Becker continued, though he added that they did not expect the administration’s “rapidity” and “viciousness.”
By the time the White House released its shutdown RIFs guidance on Sept. 24, the relationship between the unions and the legal groups already existed. They worked quickly and focused on answering strategic questions to bring the lawsuit over the following days: What plaintiff will have standing? Who’s available? How can they get the broadest protection for the most employees?
Less than a week later, they filed their complaint in the Northern District of California District Court, where the case was assigned to Judge Susan Illston, a judge potentially friendly to their cause. She had previously blocked the Trump administration’s overall RIF strategy in May, though her ruling was reversed by the Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers submitted a proposed order for Illston to consider. It included language that the administration could not administer RIFs to any employees who were part of a “program, project, or activity” that included union members — essentially protecting people beyond just those who are directly involved with the union plaintiffs.
Illston started oral arguments for the case by simply stating that she was planning to temporarily block the government’s RIFs, unless the administration’s lawyers could convince her otherwise. They ultimately didn’t, and the judge issued a temporary restraining order that was effective immediately.
The hearing was sometimes contentious — reflective of how other cases challenging the Trump administration have gone, particularly as the administration has grown more hostile towards judges. Trump has insulted federal judges by calling them “incompetent,” “crooked,” “USA hating” and “monsters;” the administration has defied court orders; and the Justice Department has even sued federal judges for ruling against the government.
“We’re still winning in court, including in front of judges that Trump himself appointed … because this administration is overreaching, and there is opportunity in that overreach to hold them accountable. And so, what has happened is the administration has managed to anger the judiciary because it’s not respecting its power,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, told NOTUS.
“This is not a popular position for the administration to be taking,” Perryman continued. (Polls have shown that Americans overwhelmingly want Trump to obey court rulings.)
Democracy Forward has now taken over 90 legal actions against the Trump administration. Back in November 2021, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, a Stockholm-based nonprofit, added the United States for the first time to its report of “backsliding” democracies, alongside countries like Nicaragua, Turkey, Russia and Venezuela.
The U.S. “remains on that list every year since,” Perryman said. “So we were already dealing with a very acute and urgent crisis in this country.”
“As a result of seeing the crisis, we started looking and researching what would happen if the federal protections that were available to people also regressed,” Perryman continued. In an environment where Congress would likely “continue to be dysfunctional and not use its power to protect the American people,” she said, relying on the judiciary “would be one of the only powers that people have.”
In 2023, the conservative Heritage Foundation released Project 2025, its blueprint for a second Trump administration written by the president’s key allies. The White House’s budget director, Russ Vought, for example, wrote in it that the president should have attorneys who are “respected yet creative and fearless … to challenge legal precedents that serve to protect the status quo.”
Democracy Forward then put together what they call Democracy 2025, an infrastructure that essentially offers resources for groups and others interested in legally challenging the administration, including providing training for individuals.
Democracy 2025 has increased the amount of members who have access to its resources exponentially in less than a year. There are now over 650 member organizations, up from the at least 280 members it had shortly after Trump was elected, according to a Nov. 14 Wayback Machine snapshot.
“We have a team of attorneys that put together litigation memos, support documents, and other resources to help partner organizations who may be thinking, ‘OK, I bring this expertise, but I don’t have that expertise, and I need to be able to do it all. Here are ideas of how to bring it together,’” said Rachel Homer, Democracy 2025’s director. (Access to materials is only available to vetted members.)
The way lawsuits against the government are put together varies, lawyers told NOTUS: Potential plaintiffs who believe they’re impacted by policies come to legal groups they’re familiar with, like how the shutdown mass layoffs lawsuit was driven by “hundreds and hundreds of calls and emails” from union members, Sanghvi said. Other times, legal groups may reach out to parties they deem have standing in different lawsuits.
“The scene is really like, we get rumblings of something, we huddle internally. We say, ‘Here’s what we saw, is there a claim? What does that look like?’ In real time, … we’re reading the relevant clients, we’re telling them what the answer would be, making plans. It’s very fluid,” said Jacquelyn Lopez, a partner at Democrats’ top law firm, Elias Law Group, and general counsel for Senate Democrats’ campaign arm.
Once those conversations lead to a lawsuit filed in court, there’s a focus in trying to get the government’s lawyers before a judge because “it has forced [the administration] to stop, to slow down, to admit in court that they can’t do what the president has claimed he could do,” Lopez told NOTUS.
“It’s one thing to put something on Truth Social with no basis, say it on Fox News, write it down in an executive order. It’s another thing to have to answer questions to a federal judge,” she continued.
In June, for example, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by the Elias Law Group challenging Trump’s executive order to take control of the Federal Election Commission after the president’s lawyers admitted in court that they did not plan to follow the order.
“We got them to admit in federal court, to a federal judge, in a binding manner, that, no, they can’t just do this. They’re not going to just do this. And the judge wrote this incredible opinion, saying, ‘If that changes, my door is open’ — basically saying, and ‘I’m going to hold them accountable,’” Lopez recalled.
Occasionally, people that firms have identified as potential plaintiffs will decline to participate because they fear repercussions. Becker told NOTUS that even “lawyers who one seeks help from” will say no because they “don’t want to be in a conflict position with the administration for understandable reasons.” (Trump has multiple times issued executive orders targeting law firms who oppose his policies, though judges have struck down some of them.)
Trump’s intimidation tactics are not the biggest hindrance to the litigation strategy — that role goes to the Supreme Court. The justices have continuously granted Trump more power and have also reversed some rulings seeking to stop Trump’s second term policies with little to no explanation.
But with Democratic lawmakers in the minority unable to rein the president in, the third branch remains the best avenue. Legal groups say they cannot be discouraged by potential interference by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.
“As lawyers, … we have to, and we do, I think, maintain some idealism that this is a country ruled by laws and, at some point, if you make the most persuasive arguments, based on those laws and precedent, you’ll win,” Becker added. “If you can’t believe in that, you can’t go on as a lawyer.”