President Donald Trump won a rare victory at the district court level on Friday when a judge in Washington, D.C., allowed the government to move full steam ahead with a series of executive orders aimed at rooting out “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) initiatives.

On Feb. 19, the National Urban League and others sued the Trump administration over several executive orders ending DEI programs in federal government contracts, barring the government from contracting with vendors who have internal DEI programs or that “promote the idea that transgender people exist,” and directing administrative agencies to only recognize “two sexes.”

In the original petition and a later-filed motion for a preliminary injunction, the plaintiffs alleged eight provisions in Trump’s anti-DEI orders ran afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause and the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech, among other issues.

In a 58-page memorandum opinion, U.S. District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, rejected those claims, both procedurally and for their legal arguments.

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“For one reason or another, Plaintiffs’ claims are likely to fail,” the judge writes. “Some falter on standing—a prerequisite to success on the merits—and others on the underlying First and Fifth Amendment claims.”

The majority of the court’s opinion strikes a blow for the long-aggressive nature of Article III standing, which is widely understood by legal scholars as “conservative standing doctrine.”

This judicial theory was created in two cases from the 1920s by conservative judges who sought to restrain the use and limits of constitutional redress. In other words, standing doctrine was created – and has over time been honed and sustained – to limit citizens from suing the government over perceived violations of their rights. While technically procedural in nature, as opposed to relying on underlying arguments in a dispute, standing arguments are fact-intensive.

Kelly, for his part, quickly dispenses with how he views the facts in the case brought by the nonprofit organizations.

“For half the challenged provisions, Plaintiffs fail to establish a prerequisite to success on the merits: standing,” the opinion goes on. “Presidential directives to subordinates that inflict no concrete harm on private parties—or at least not on these parties—do not present a justiciable case or controversy.”

In the present case, the judge found many of the challenged provisions had to do with changing the government’s own behavior, and do not result in what, in standing doctrine legalese, is known as an “injury in fact.” This state of affairs, rather, turns the plaintiffs into “at most ‘concerned bystanders’ to internal Executive Branch processes.”

“Everything is intra-governmental,” the judge muses.

More Law&Crime coverage: ‘The opposite of diversity is segregation’: Judge castigates Trump over anti-DEI policies, but says he cannot intervene

In sum, Kelly found four of the challenged provisions asked “nothing from Plaintiffs—no compliance, no changed behavior, nothing at all” because those provisions are “not aimed at them” but instead tell “only the agencies to do something.”

For the remaining four challenged provisions, however, the court determined the plaintiffs did, in fact, have standing.

But the court still rejected their arguments as legally deficient.

“Plaintiffs have not shown that the provisions threaten a protected liberty or property interest—a threshold requirement for due process claims,” Kelly’s opinion continues. “And even if they had, Plaintiffs’ vagueness challenge fails for independent reasons. The First Amendment claim, moreover, clashes with two settled rules: the government does not abridge the right to free speech by choosing not to subsidize it, and that right does not permit Plaintiffs or anyone else to violate federal anti-discrimination law.”

One of the major problems, the court says, is that the plaintiffs argued a bit too much, resting their claims on so-called “facial rather than as-applied challenges.”

In lawsuits, government action can be challenged facially, meaning in general, or as-applied, meaning in a specific circumstance.

In the present case, Kelly suggests the plaintiffs would have been better off limiting their claims to more specific problems. Instead, they argued, as the judge framed the issues, that each of the challenged anti-DEI provisions “is unconstitutional in all its applications.”

The Trump administration recently scored a limited but significant win in its widely-telegraphed efforts to pare down, and perhaps ultimately shutter, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

In a terse, 3-page Friday ruling, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals stayed three parts of an eight-part preliminary injunction previously entered by U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on March 28.

In the underlying case, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU) alleges the Trump administration – specifically Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought – unlawfully fired CFPB employees without cause and scrubbed CFPB data from its records, including important CFPB contracts that are “necessary for cybersecurity.”

In a preview of her injunction, Jackson told U.S. Department of Justice lawyers she was inclined to grant the plaintiffs their requested relief to “make sure [the CFPB] hasn’t been choked out of its very existence” before she can issue a judgment on the merits.

A federal judge on Friday refused to stay his own order allowing The Associated Press back into the White House press pool, dealing the Trump administration its second loss in the case this week.

In a relatively terse 5-page memorandum order, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in his first term, denied a request to stay the injunction pending appeal.

But there is time yet for the appellate court to grant a stay of its own. The Department of Justice filed for such relief on April 10 — two days after the lower court entered its order in the AP’s favor. McFadden took note of the leeway granted in his Friday ruling.

“The Court has already stayed its injunction, on its own motion, until April 13, 2025, to allow the Government time to appeal,” McFadden wrote. “The Court will not extend that stay further.”

The Trump administration is attempting to block an order by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., forcing it to let The Associated Press back into the White House press pool this week after the president tried barring the news outlet over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

The Justice Department filed a motion Wednesday to stay U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden’s preliminary injunction issued on Tuesday granting the AP’s request to block the White House’s ban on its access to the Oval Office, East Room and other sites of press events — saying the ban amounted to “impermissible viewpoint discrimination.” McFadden noted how the AP was likely to prove in court how it “suffered unlawful retaliation for exercising its speech rights,” despite claims by the Trump administration that it deserved the ban.

“Access restrictions must be reasonable and not viewpoint based,” McFadden wrote. “While the AP does not have a constitutional right to enter the Oval Office, it does have a right to not be excluded because of its viewpoint. And the AP says that is exactly what is happening.”

Chief Justice John Roberts on Wednesday once again swooped in at the eleventh hour to bail out the Trump administration, this time staying an appellate court order preventing the president from ousting two Biden-appointed members of independent federal labor agencies.

Roberts did not rule on the merits of the case, but stayed a lower court order that reinstated two chairwomen to their positions on independent federal labor boards in a case that is likely to have wide-reaching implications on Donald Trump’s continued effort to slash the government workforce and wield unprecedented control over the federal bureaucracy.

The chief justice’s order was handed down within hours of the Justice Department filing a petition urging the high court to intervene after the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., affirmed a lower court order reinstating Cathy A. Harris to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and Gwynne Wilcox to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The appeals court previously reasoned that the fired chairwomen were improperly dismissed without cause, violating federal law.

Meanwhile, the administration has argued that prohibiting the president from selecting personnel in the executive branch impedes his ability to do his job, asserting, “this situation is untenable.”

“This case raises a constitutional question of profound importance: whether the President can supervise and control agency heads who exercise vast executive power on the President’s behalf, or whether Congress may insulate those agency heads from presidential control by preventing the President from removing them at will,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the 39-page petition. “[T]he district court’s orders violate Article II on an independent and equally troubling basis. Federal courts lack any constitutional, statutory, or equitable authority to order the reinstatement of agency heads whom the President has removed and to force the President to rely on principal officers whom the President believes should not be exercising any executive power. Exercising non-existent equitable authority to saddle the President with already-removed principal officers ‘deeply wounds the President’ in his exercise of the executive power.”

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., is forcing the Trump administration to let the Associated Press back into the White House press pool after it tried barring the news outlet over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”

In a Tuesday court order, the judge said the media outlet was likely to prove it “suffered unlawful retaliation for exercising its speech rights.”

U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Donald Trump appointee who was put on the bench in 2017, agreed to grant a request by the AP for a preliminary injunction blocking the White House’s ban on its access to the Oval Office, East Room and other sites of press events. In a memorandum order, the judge reasoned that the government’s ban amounted to “impermissible viewpoint discrimination.”

“Access restrictions must be reasonable and not viewpoint based,” McFadden wrote. “While the AP does not have a constitutional right to enter the Oval Office, it does have a right to not be excluded because of its viewpoint. And the AP says that is exactly what is happening.”

The federal judge who has been going back and forth with the Trump administration over its mass deportations of Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 (AEA) — and whether administration officials blatantly ignored orders he gave to shut them down — took a Justice Department lawyer to task on Thursday with an hourlong onslaught of questions and comments about the case, including warnings about holding people in contempt.

At one point during the hearing, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg flat-out called the Justice Department’s actions “pretty sketchy” as it continued to try and say certain information about the Trump deportation flights couldn’t be shared with Boasberg, even in a classified facility and under seal.

“If I don’t agree, if I don’t find your legal arguments convincing and I believe there’s probable cause to find contempt, what I’m asking is how should I determine who the contemnor or contemnors are?” Boasberg asked Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Immigration Litigation Drew Ensign, who was arguing on behalf of the DOJ.

A Jan. 6 defendant and Oath Keepers member from Florida who was linked to an explosives-laden RV that was allegedly brought to the Washington, D.C., area had a series of separate convictions — for possessing illegal firearms and U.S. Army grenades — officially vacated and dismissed by a federal judge Wednesday in the Sunshine State as part of President Donald Trump’s Jan. 6 pardon order.

Jeremy Brown, a former U.S. Army Green Beret who was given a seven-year sentence for the weapons and grenades case, gained support from Trump’s Justice Department in late February, with federal prosecutors telling U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday that “based on consultation” with DOJ leadership it was the position of the United States that the offenses Brown was accused of — including possessing a modified AR-15 short-barreled rifle and sawed-off shotgun, both unregistered and owned illegally — were “intended to be covered” by Trump’s pardon order.

A federal appeals court will leave in place an earlier ruling allowing the president to terminate the head of a board that reviews firings of federal employees after the Justice Department argued that staying its order would effectively disenfranchise those who voted for President Donald Trump.

A three-judge panel on the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia had previously rejected a request to stay its decision allowing President Trump to fire Cathy A. Harris from the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). Mirroring the appellate panel’s Friday tally, the judges voted 2-1 in rejecting a request to stay its Friday decision, which granted a stay of a lower court’s order that required Harris be returned to her role on the board.

U.S. Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, and U.S. Circuit Judge Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, on Friday both voted in favor of staying the district court’s ruling, while U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Millett, a Barack Obama appointee, dissented. Harris immediately requested a stay of the appeals court’s order pending her request that the case be presented to the court “en banc,” meaning all of the judges on the circuit.

Walker and Henderson again voted to reject Harris’ request for a stay of the stay while Millett said she would grant the request.

Harris, a Democrat who was nominated to the MSPB by President Joe Biden, was supposed to serve until her term expired in 2028 before she received notice last month that she was “terminated, effective immediately.” Without Harris, the board lacks a quorum, which could hamper its ability to function as the Trump administration continues its sprawling efforts to gut the federal workforce.

“As a panel of this Court explained in Dellinger v. Bessent — when staying an order reinstating another principal executive officer whom the President removed — and as Judge Henderson reiterated in this case, ‘it is impossible to unwind the days during which a President is directed to recognize and work with an agency head whom he has already removed,”” the DOJ’s 12-page filing opposing both Harris’ second stay request and her request for a rehearing en banc states. “Judge Walker similarly recognized that ‘[t]he forcible reinstatement of a presidentially removed principal officer disenfranchises voters by hampering the President’s ability to govern.’”

A member of the Merit Systems Protection Board who was removed by President Donald Trump earlier this year has asked for an appellate court to reconsider its opinion allowing her firing to go forward.

On Feb. 10, the 45th and 47th president tried to fire Cathy Harris, a Joe Biden appointee whose term expires in 2028, in an email from an assistant, telling her she was “terminated, effective immediately.”

Harris sued in Washington, D.C., and days later won her job back through a temporary restraining order issued in February — and then a permanent injunction which was issued earlier this month — by U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, a Barack Obama appointee.

On Friday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a 2-1 ruling in the government’s favor, staying the injunction. The ruling allows Trump to fire both Harris and National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox — who had also won reprieve from a politically-motivated firing at the district court level.