(CNN) — Among dozens of court cases challenging President Donald Trump’s policies, one case this week has moved faster than most.
In less than 24 hours, the American medical community and dozens of universities secured an early win in blocking the Trump administration’s effort to cut millions of dollars of federal funding supporting medical research.
After the Trump administration capped the amount of money research institutions receive from the government to support health research, 22 states plus health care systems and universities from across the country filed multiple lawsuits on Monday to stop it.
By midnight, a federal judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking the cutbacks — marking one of the fastest-moving, most robust examples yet of the courts standing in the way of Trump’s efforts to overhaul the US government.
As Trump and his DOGE chief, Elon Musk, have taken a sledgehammer to the federal government – stopping federal foreign aid, firing federal workers, ending government programs and even closing agencies altogether – the unprecedented executive actions have been met by nearly four dozen emergency lawsuits designed to slow or stop them.
So far, the lawsuits have been effective: The Trump administration was told in five different ways on Monday and once on Tuesday it must stop or pause the implementation of its policies.
That included federal judges blocking Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship, pausing its effort to offer “buyouts” to federal workers, restoring the flow of federal money to environmental and health care programs, reinstating (at least temporarily) the top investigator for federal whistleblowers who had been fired, ordering some health care data to be posted again to government websites, and blocking the attempt to cut federally subsidized medical research.
These early legal wins – even temporary ones – are quickly creating a new playbook for how Trump policies are tested and responded to.
“What we’re seeing is an effort to arrogate control over federal spending on a scale we’ve never seen, and with callous disregard for the consequences. And the courts are responding in kind,” Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and CNN legal analyst, said Tuesday morning about Trump’s approach so far.
Often the judges sitting at the trial-court level have tried to preserve the status quo before irreversible harm could be done. Trump administration officials say they were expecting these early moves to be challenged in court, and in many cases, legal issues will be revisited in the days and months ahead, by multiple levels of courts, including potentially the US Supreme Court.
Trump officials, as well as the president, have bristled at some of the judicial rulings, with Vice President JD Vance and Musk both suggesting the administration should disregard court rulings, a scenario that has raised fears the country could be barreling toward a constitutional crisis.
Trump criticized the judges in a radio interview Monday, saying they made “very bad rulings” and that “they want to sort of tell everybody how to run the country.”
Pushback to funding cuts
The cases so far have demonstrated how the Trump policies that startled Washington over the past four weeks could change American life – from reshaping the national approach to immigration to curtailing medical research and foreign aid programs. The research universities, for instance, said on Monday a loss of millions of federal dollars that supports their labs’ overhead costs would “devastate medical research.”
Lawmakers from both parties raised concerns that the cuts would hit their local economies, both in blue and red states.
Massachusetts took the lead in one of the challenges to the National Institutes of Health grant funding cuts, which had been announced by the Trump administration last Friday. The state was the first mover because of how deeply the policy would affect universities’ research programs there, slashing tens of millions of dollars in federal support for institutional overhead costs – but also because the state is among several Democrat-led states that are mounting some of the most significant challenges against the administration.
“We will not allow the Trump administration to play politics with public health,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said at a press conference on Monday.
The response to medical funding cuts was one of many cases where Trump’s actions have been almost immediately challenged in court.
The lawsuits that have been filed fall into several categories. They include questions about whether the president can halt funding approved by Congress or fire whole categories of federal workers, whether privacy protections can prevent Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing personal data held by the government, and whether the Trump administration’s social policies and immigration crackdown stretch beyond the limits of law and Constitution
Outrage from Trump allies
One of the rulings that’s sparked the strongest reaction from Trump’s allies was when a federal judge this past weekend blocked DOGE from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system, which the judge said risked “irreparable harm.”
The efforts from Musk’s team to access the Treasury’s payment system – which doles out trillions of dollars in government spending – prompted five former Treasury secretaries to write a joint op-ed on Monday saying they were so “alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments” and that, if pursued, Trump’s approach would be “unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.”
The backlash to the judge’s ruling on the Treasury system from both inside and outside the Trump administration – including from Trump and Vance – raised new concerns that the Trump White House will ignore court orders.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vance said in a post on X. “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.”
Judges are already warning the administration not to ignore their rulings. On Monday, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the reinstatement of funding for environmental and health groups that was held up, writing that the administration violated the “plain text” of his earlier order unfreezing billions of dollars in federal aid.
And in a separate case Monday, in Washington, DC, federal employees told a judge that the administration had failed to reinstate USAID workers who were put on leave. A major hearing in that case is set for Wednesday.
GOP-friendly rulings help Trump foes
The current political climate toward judicial rulings has flipped on its head from last year, when Republicans cheered rulings blocking Biden administration executive actions. Now, judges are seizing on rulings from that era that favored former President Joe Biden’s opponents.
A controversial concurrence written last year by conservative Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett has helped empower judges who told the Trump administration to press pause on its sweeping maneuvers. Barrett’s concurrence, in which she defended a conservative appeals court’s aggressive use of an administrative stay in a blockbuster immigration case, has been cited by at least four judges in recent days as they have justified their authority to order the administration to restore the status quo while the legal challenges continue.
Sources have previously told CNN the Trump team fully expected that every move would be challenged in court and that they would lose cases, especially when they are initially filed in friendly federal jurisdictions like Washington, DC, and New England. Ultimately, many of the disputes are likely to end up in the Supreme Court, which could side with Trump’s vision of an expansive definition of executive power, on at least some issues.
At the same time, the executive branch is beginning to argue more forcefully in court in a handful of the cases that the courts shouldn’t be involved in decisions like these that the president makes – that he should have the power to manage the executive branch as he chooses.
In one example of the DOJ’s boldness defending Trump’s power as president, lawyers for the administration told a judge Trump was simply doing his job to align the country’s expenditures “with American interests.” The president should be able to put USAID’s federal workers on leave, they argued on Monday, because “the President’s powers in the realm of foreign affairs are vast and generally unreviewable.”
Trump’s policy decisions around foreign aid, the Justice Department added, “is the sort of conduct that a federal court should be loath to disrupt.”
CNN’s Paula Reid, Devan Cole and Meg Tirrell contributed to this report.
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