Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s efforts to transform federal spending and the federal workforce is crashing up against judges who’ve temporarily blocked several of their policies.
Judges have frozen Trump’s “spending freeze” orders, the Musk team’s effort to access government payment systems, Musk’s “fork in the road” offer for federal employees to resign, and an attempt to put most of USAID’s staff on administrative leave.
Which has raised the question: Will the administration comply with these judges’ orders, or try to defy them?
Vice President JD Vance seemed to hint at the possibility of open defiance in an X post on Sunday.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance wrote. “If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
But traditionally, in the American system, what counts as the “executive’s legitimate power” has been determined by the judiciary. Blatantly defying a court order would be a monumental step, one that even many conservatives would find alarming.
Yet there are elements in right-wing circles — Vance included — who have previously advocated doing just that. And if they win out, we’ll be embroiled in a very serious constitutional crisis.
Despite Vance’s rhetoric, the Trump administration has not yet openly rejected any judicial order so far. In court filings, they’ve claimed to be complying with all of them.
But there are questions about whether they actually are. One judge ruled Monday that the administration had failed to comply with his order unfreezing the spending freeze. And USAID employees are claiming in a court filing that they haven’t been reinstated in their jobs.
In the near term, slipperiness like this — rather than explicit, unambiguous defiance of court authority — may be the way the Trump administration will try to circumvent court orders they dislike. That way, they can claim they’re complying with the letter of a ruling, while not exactly following the spirit of it.
Then, if the judge complains, they could try something similar again — or try to go above the judge’s head with an appeal, eventually to a Supreme Court that may be friendlier.
Courts are the most important remaining guardrail against untrammeled presidential power
The American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin is the epitome of the reasonable, thoughtful conservative. He’s a recurring guest on the Ezra Klein Show, and when he appeared last week, his takes on the Trump administration so far were characteristically calm and measured, viewing it mainly as politics as usual rather than something to panic about.
So Klein asked Levin: What would have to happen to make him worry that Trump truly was headed in a dangerous and unprecedented direction? “What would really frighten you?”
“My biggest fear is the administration deciding not to abide by court orders,” Levin said. “If the administration openly defies a court order, then I think we are in a different situation.”
A willing, voluntary respect for the rule of law holds the constitutional system together.
Indeed, with congressional Republicans ill-inclined to criticize or counter Trump, the courts may be the most important check on presidential power remaining. So long as the courts rule on whether the Trump administration’s policies are illegal — and so long as the administration respects their rulings, even negative ones — the rule of law still exists.
So if you don’t like a judge’s ruling, what you should do is appeal. And if you appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court, and you don’t like their ruling either, well, you’ve got to accept it anyway.
Many traditional conservatives share this point of view — not least because the current Supreme Court majority is quite conservative and will likely be able to restrain Democratic presidents for many years to come.
But some thinkers on what’s known as the New Right have in recent years argued that major changes to the American system of government are necessary — and that, if the courts get in the way, they should be ignored.
The vice president of the United States has, in the past, voiced agreement with such views. In 2021, then-US Senate candidate Vance said that Trump, if restored to office, should fire “every single midlevel bureaucrat” and “civil servant” — “and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
“We are in a late Republican period,” Vance elaborated (referring to the Roman Republic). “We’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
Ultimately, this amounts to a belief that the president should seize more power and ignore legal and procedural obstacles in his way, including judicial rulings. It’s a dangerous road to go down, because — as Vance’s apocryphal Jackson quote indicates — judges don’t actually have power to force the administration into compliance. A willing, voluntary respect for the rule of law holds the constitutional system together.
So does the Trump administration actually intend to make good on Vance’s redpilled fantasies?
The newest judicial rulings against the Trump administration — and how they’ve responded
In the second Trump administration’s first three weeks, officials have accepted several adverse court rulings — such as one blocking Trump’s attempt to roll back birthright citizenship — in the ordinary fashion. That is, they’ve said they’re abiding by the ruling, even though they disagree with it, and promising to appeal.
But one particular judicial order made them irate. This was a Saturday morning decision by New York District Judge Paul Engelmayer, dealing with the Musk team’s newfound control of the Treasury Department systems that disperse government salaries, payments, and grants.
Per Engelmayer’s order, only properly cleared civil servants were permitted to have access to these payment systems — Musk’s DOGE team had to stay out.
Now, this order was only set to be in effect for a few days; this lawsuit was being handed off to another judge, who will hold a hearing on Friday. The hold was a temporary measure to let this next judge hear the case and decide what to do going forward.
But many on the right reacted to it with fury, calling it overbroad. Musk called the judge corrupt and demanded his impeachment. And on Sunday, Vance posted his assertion that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Given Vance’s past comment that Trump should defy judicial orders, many interpreted this as a signal that the constitutional crisis had arrived — that the Trump administration was gearing up to defy a court order.
Later that night, however, the administration’s lawyers sounded a more measured tone in a court filing. While criticizing Engelmayer’s ruling and asking it to be revoked or modified, they stressed that they “are in compliance with it” — as they have in other suits where their policies have been frozen by judges too.
But in some of those cases, questions have arisen about just how compliant the Trump team has been.
Chief Judge John McConnell, of the US District Court in Rhode Island, has been weighing a challenge to Trump’s “spending freeze,” and issued a temporary halt on that policy. However, in a ruling Monday, McConnell wrote that the administration had “continued to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated funds.” He ordered them to “immediately restore frozen funding” and “end any federal funding pause.”
Soon, we will see how the Trump administration responds to that order.
But so far, the administration has not gone so far as blatantly and unambiguously defying a court order. They have not told a judge: “We simply refuse to do what you say.” They are still at least acting like they’re playing by the courts’ rules.
We’ll see how long that keeps up.
