The Outstanding Cases Against The Trump Administration
1A
NPR
4.4 • 4.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2026
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
Changes to federal grant funding, DEI policies, the federal workforce were all met with fierce resistance and legal challenges, totaling more than 350 lawsuits so far. Judges across the country are also mulling whether Trump’s attempt to change birthright citizenship and his deployment of ICE agents for mass deportations are legal.
The administration has spent a lot of time defending its policy actions in court. We get up to speed on their record over the past year.
How successful has the administration been in the courts? And what cases from 2025 remain up in the air?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, |
| 0:07.4 | working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all. On the web administration brought a lot of change. |
| 0:25.7 | The president undid longstanding practices around immigration enforcement, introduced sweeping |
| 0:30.8 | tariffs, withdrew federal funding for universities, and tried to remake the federal workforce. |
| 0:36.0 | And he and his administration were met with fierce backlash in the courts. |
| 0:39.9 | This may be the big one. |
| 0:41.8 | The administration of Donald Trump versus one of the most significant cultural institutions in the United States, academic institution, Harvard University. |
| 0:50.2 | Have some of these raids gone too far? |
| 0:52.3 | No, I think they haven't gone far enough because we've been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges. |
| 0:58.7 | We have this unelected fourth unconstitutional branch of government, which is the bureaucracy. |
| 1:04.7 | Suing the Department of Justice to halt, |
| 1:07.6 | stepped toward the mass unlawful termination of Bureau employees, and what they claim is |
| 1:12.6 | unlawful retaliation for doing their jobs to investigate the January 6th cases. |
| 1:18.7 | How successful has the administration been in the courts, and what cases from 2025 remain up in the air? |
| 1:26.0 | We get into it after the break. I'm Jen White. You're listening to |
| 1:29.4 | the 1A podcast. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to. |
| 1:37.7 | Joining us is Josh Gerstein. He's a senior legal affairs reporter at Politico, and he joins us |
| 1:43.1 | from Alexandria, Virginia. Josh, welcome back to the program. Hey, Jen, good to be with you again. And with us from Washington, D.C. is Mary McCord. She's executive director of Georgetown University's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection. She's also a visiting law professor at the Georgetown University Law Center. Mary, it's great to have you back. |
| 2:01.7 | It's nice to be with you, Jen. First, I just want your reads on how successful the Department of Justice has been in winning the more than 350 cases that have challenged the administration's executive actions so far. Mary? |
| 2:15.4 | So this is sort of a tale of two levels of courts, I would say. The challenges to |
| 2:21.9 | administration's executive overreach have been overwhelmingly successful in the lower courts. |
| 2:28.1 | They've obtained many, many injunctions against mass firings, dismantling of agencies, immigration-related rulings, |
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