In a stunning 8-1 decision Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court obliterated Clinton-appointed Judge Susan Illston’s May 22 injunction that had blocked President Trump’s sweeping plan to slash federal bloat and reorganize 20 agencies.
Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented—and even her fellow liberal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, had to coach her on the basics of the case.
Judge Illston’s order froze thousands of Reduction-in-Force (RIF) notices and slammed the brakes on Trump’s Executive Order 14210, which directs agency heads to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”
The order is the cornerstone of Trump’s pledge to de-weaponize the bureaucracy and return power to the people.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who appeared to be arguing a case entirely different from the one before the Court, was the only dissent.
In her fiery 15-page dissent, Jackson launched into a long-winded history lesson about executive overreach, Congress’s role in creating federal agencies, and past presidents’ requests for reorganization authority.
She insisted that Trump’s Executive Order 14210 amounted to an illegal “critical transformation” of the federal bureaucracy that could not move forward without congressional approval.
But her alarmist dissent was so far off base that even Justice Sotomayor had to step in and gently remind Jackson that the Court wasn’t even ruling on the merits of the reorganization plans themselves.
Justice Sotomayor made it abundantly clear in her concurrence: the executive order merely instructed agencies to plan reorganizations “consistent with applicable law.” The actual restructuring plans haven’t even been challenged in this phase. The case isn’t about their legality—yet.
Hellbound and Down 