Trump scored big legal wins this week, but his efforts to reshape the government still face hurdles

The Trump administration’s efforts to swiftly remake the federal government notched some big wins in court this week — including a ruling that allows its firing spree to continue — but a number of the president’s other initiatives are facing significant roadblocks.

Among the victories in dozens of cases filed against the administration across the country since President Donald Trump took office include judges denying restraining orders in a pair of cases brought against Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

The losses include an appeals court denying Trump’s bid for an emergency order allowing him to implement his planned restrictions on birthright citizenship — and the court won’t hear arguments on the case until June.

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The administration was also hit with several new lawsuits, including another challenge to its bid to shed tens of thousands probationary workers.

Here’s a look at the swirl of fast moving legal developments over the past week:

Mass layoffs can proceed for now

On Thursday night, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., denied a request from labor unions for a temporary restraining order barring mass layoffs of probationary workers and other federal employees. The White House is aiming to cut up to 10% of the federal workforce and began by focusing on probationary workers — recent hires or sometimes longtime employees who were recently moved into new positions — before moving on to additional cuts.

The unions charged the directives exceeded the president’s authority since Congress is responsible for funding decisions.

U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Cooper, however, found that the unions brought the case in the wrong forum and that he lacked jurisdiction. “The claims must instead be brought before the Federal Labor Relations Authority,” an independent administrative agency that handles federal labor disputes, the judge wrote.

The White House praised the ruling, saying, “Thanks to this and other legal wins, President Trump and his administration will continue to deliver on the American people’s mandate to eliminate wasteful spending and make federal agencies more efficient,” said a spokeswoman, Anna Kelly.

It did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the other cases in this article.

Judge lifts order that protected USAID workers

The federal judge in Washington, D.C. who previously paused a deadline to strip down the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, to a few hundred employees lifted his temporary restraining order Friday.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols said the government had addressed the safety concerns he had for overseas workers impacted by the administration’s abrupt decision to place them on administrative leave while it reviews and “realigns” foreign aid.

Unions had argued the moves were being carried out to “systematically dismantle” the agency, and Nichols had issued his ruling just ahead of a deadline earlier this month for the administration to reduce the number of staff to 611 from 4,800.

The judge found that with the safety claims addressed, the unions’ “theories of harm fundamentally rely on their members’ employment relationship with USAID,” and that he likely lacks jurisdiction over those claims. “The Court will accordingly deny plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and will dissolve its previously issued temporary restraining order,” he wrote.

A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Lauren Bateman of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, said “we will move expeditiously for further and permanent relief to stop the devastation.”

DOGE racks up some wins…

DOGE prevailed in two cases seeking to curtail its powers.

On Tuesday, a judge in D.C. denied a student group’s request for an order blocking DOGE staffers from getting access to sensitive data systems at the Department of Education, finding the group didn’t show “it will likely suffer irreparable harm.”

The harms the University of California Student Association said it could suffer as a result of DOGE’s access is “entirely conjectural,” U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss found. “UCSA provides no evidence, beyond sheer speculation, that would allow the Court to infer that ED or DOGE staffers will misuse or further disseminate this information,” he wrote.

A broader action brought by 14 states charging that DOGE is operating illegally faced a setback before a different D.C. jurist, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan. The states had sought an order blocking DOGE from accessing data systems or making personnel decisions at seven federal agencies.

“The court is aware that DOGE’s unpredictable actions have resulted in considerable uncertainty and confusion for Plaintiffs and many of their agencies and residents,” Chutkan found, but the states haven’t linked those actions to any “imminent harm” in their states. The judge denied the states’ request for a temporary restraining order, but is allowing them to proceed with their arguments for a preliminary injunction in the case. She’s also allowing the government to proceed with a motion to dismiss.

In her ruling on the TRO, Chutkan made clear she has concerns about DOGE’s powers and authority. The states “legitimately call into question what appears to be the unchecked authority of an unelected individual and an entity that was not created by Congress and over which it has no oversight,” she wrote.

… and a significant loss

In a ruling Friday night, a federal judge in New York issued a preliminary injunction barring DOGE’s access to sensitive Treasury Department systems, strengthening the previous temporary restraining order.

In a scathing ruling, U.S. District Judge Jeanette Vargas said the coalition have states who sued “established that there is a realistic danger that confidential financial information will be disclosed absent the grant of injunctive relief.”

The launch of the Treasury DOGE team was “chaotic and haphazard,” the judge wrote, and one DOGE official, Marko Elez, was given broader access to one of the systems than he should have had. He was also allowed to take screenshots of some of the data, and “sent emails outside of the Treasury Department to USDS/DOGE,” Vargas wrote.

“The Treasury Department cannot say whether or not those emails contained sensitive [Bureau of Financial Services] data. More than a week after Elez resigned from the Treasury Department, BFS was still in the process of reviewing the logs of Elez’s activity on his laptop and within the BFS systems to determine if there was any unauthorized use,” the judge wrote. “Even now, weeks after his departure, the Treasury Department is still reviewing his logs to determine what precisely he accessed and what he did with his access.”

The judge’s order directs DOGE officials to get proper training on security protocols and procedures before they can regain access to the systems.

Birthright citizenship effort falls short again

On Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined the Justice Department’s emergency request to implement Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship.

The panel denied the emergency application, finding the Justice Department had not made a “strong showing that they are likely to succeed on the merits of this appeal.”  The judges are allowing the government to file an expedited appeal, but won’t hear arguments in the case until sometime in June, court filings show.

Trump’s order, which is being challenged in at least nine lawsuits, attempts to limit birthright citizenship to people who have at least one parent who is a United States citizen or permanent resident. At least three judges have blocked the directive, finding it violates the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Foreign aid freeze still in place despite court order, judge says

On Thursday, a judge in Washington found the administration had not fully complied with his court order pausing the freezing of foreign assistance grants and contracts, but declined a request to find the government in contempt.

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali last week ordered the administration to allow the disbursement of U.S. foreign assistance after hearing claims from federal contractors that a blanket pause directed by the president and carried out by Secretary of State Marco Rubio had caused them — and the people they were assisting — “irreparable harm.”

The order had left some wiggle room for the State Department to take action in some individual grants with specific contract terms. In their motion for contempt, the contractors said the government had determined that “substantially all” the terminations were allowed.

The judge said his order was “not inviting Defendants to continue the suspension while they reviewed contracts and legal authorities to come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension,” and directed them to immediately comply.

The ruling was the second time a judge has found the government was not complying with a court order — a federal judge in Rhode Island last week found the government hadn’t fully complied with his order pausing a broader federal funding freeze.

Judge blocks Trump order on DEI initiatives

A federal judge in Maryland blocked the Trump administration from terminating federal grants and contracts related to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives DEI as called for by two Trump’s executive orders.

The Friday night ruling bars the administration from requiring federal contractors and grant recipients to certify that they do not engage in any “equity-related” programs, finding that the plaintiffs in the case are likely to prove the language in the orders is “unconstitutionally vague” and that the government is engaging in “viewpoint discrimination.”

“Plaintiffs have amply established a likelihood that they will succeed in proving that the Termination Provision invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement over billions of dollars in government funding,” U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled, issuing a nationwide preliminary injunction.

‘Common sense’ clash on transgender military order

At another hearing in D.C. on Tuesday, a federal judge indicated she was highly skeptical of an executive order banning transgender people from the military and the government’s claim that the order does not actually ban them.

“On balance the text does not connote a transgender ban,” Justice Department lawyer Jason Lynch told U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes.

“If we had President Trump here right now and we said is this a transgender ban, what do you think he would say?” the judge asked. “All the language in it is indicative that it requires a transgender ban.”

She also pushed back on the order’s requirements that the military end the use of preferred pronouns, asking how it affects military readiness. “Any common sense rational human being understands that it doesn’t,” she said.

The hearing is scheduled to continue on March 3, after the Pentagon is expected to release a report on how it will enforce Trump’s order.

Another judge blocks transgender care ban

A federal judge in Seattle on Sunday became the second to block an executive order aimed at restricting transgender health care for anyone under 19.

U.S. District Judge Lauren King signed off on a restraining order sought by Washington state, Minnesota and Oregon challenging Trump’s Jan. 28 executive order titled, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

The order directs that federal funds be shut off from any medical institution that provides hormones, puberty blockers and “surgical procedures that attempt to transform an individual’s physical appearance to align with an identity that differs from his or her sex” for individuals 18 or younger.

King found the order “discriminates on the basis of transgender status” and is an unconstitutional expansion of presidential powers. “The United States Constitution exclusively grants the power of the purse to Congress, not the President, and ‘the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds’ Congress appropriates,” the judge wrote.

Judge rejects email hacking concerns

On Monday, Moss, the D.C. judge in one of the DOGE cases, also rejected a request for a restraining order by government employees who said they were improperly sent an email from the Office of Personnel Management in its new effort to be able to email all government employees at once.

The employees contended they’re not executive branch employees, and their inclusion in an “insecure system” has left them “more vulnerable to hacking.” The judge found the employees lacked standing to sue and had not shown that they’re likely to “suffer an irreparable injury.”

More cases pending

A number of new lawsuits were filed this week challenging other of the administration’s actions, adding to the scores that have been filed in the month since Trump talk office.

Among them is a lawsuit brought by the National TPS Alliance against the Department of Homeland Security. It challenges DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s directive to bring an early end to temporary protected status for 600,000 Venezuelans who are currently in the country, saying she had no authority to do so.

An action filed Thursday by a left-leaning government watchdog group is seeking to force DOGE to disclose information about its formation and operations. The suit by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, alleges that DOGE has “worked in the shadows — a cadre of largely unidentified actors, whose status as government employees is unclear, controlling major government functions with no oversight. USDS has provided no meaningful transparency into its operations or assurances that it is maintaining proper records of its unprecedented and legally dubious work.”

The National Urban League is leading a lawsuit challenging three of Trump’s executive orders, including one titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful DEI Programs and Preferencing.” The suit says the orders “falsely assert” that diversity, equity and inclusion “programs and activities are illegal and inconsistent with merit, hard work, and standards of excellence. They penalize Plaintiffs for expressing viewpoints in support of DEIA and transgender people.”

On Thursday, shortly after Cooper’s ruling allowing mass layoffs to proceed, a group of labor unions filed suit in federal court in California challenging the dismissal of probationary employees, alleging the layoffs are illegal in part because the administration is citing bogus performance reasons for the terminations.

“OPM, the federal agency charged with implementing this nation’s employment laws, in one fell swoop has perpetrated one of the most massive employment frauds in the history of this country, telling tens of thousands of workers that they are being fired for performance reasons, when they most certainly were not,” the suit says.

This article was originally published on NBCNews.com

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