Just over a month into his second term, President Donald Trump is moving with haste to push legal battles over his executive actions to the Supreme Court, signaling an aggressive strategy to expand presidential power in the face of resistance from lower courts.
Trump has made three attempts over the past several days to rush to the high court, as the second-term Republican president seeks to secure rulings that could cement a broad vision of executive authority. The most recent example came on the evening of Feb. 26, when Trump’s administration gained the first Supreme Court victory of its current term after asking the justices to undo a lower court order to pay $2 billion in foreign aid funds.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, an appointee of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, issued an order on Feb. 25 for the funds to be released by midnight Wednesday, following Trump’s attempt to halt them as part of a broader effort to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Hours before the deadline, Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay, pausing the lower court’s ruling and giving the parties until Friday to file additional responses over the dispute.
While many Republicans saw Robert’s action as a win for Trump, Georgetown Law professor Steve Vladeck framed the chief justice’s intervention as a temporary procedural move but noted its potential implications, according to a recent entry on his blog, One First.
“At the most superficial level, it seems obvious that the Trump administration should ultimately lose these cases—that it lacks the power to simply stop spending money Congress has appropriated,” Vladeck said. “But the question before Chief Justice Roberts last night wasn’t (solely) about who is ultimately going to win these cases; it was much more complicated.”
Trump’s other high court pitch: A disgruntled whistleblower’s refusal to be fired
The same night as Roberts’s decision, the Justice Department clamped down on its request for the Supreme Court to weigh in on the firing of Hampton Dellinger, the head of a government whistleblower office. In a letter to the nine justices, six of which are appointees of Republican presidents, Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued that Dellinger was still “wielding executive power” despite Trump’s efforts to remove him.
This followed an earlier Supreme Court emergency petition over the Dellinger matter last week, when the justices declined in short order to overturn a lower court’s temporary restraining order preventing Dellinger’s removal. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, extended her temporary order before it expired Wednesday, leaving Dellinger in his position for at least another three days while further injunctive relief is being considered.
Why the Roberts Court may hand Trump victory in more cases than one
Legal experts say Trump’s push to the Supreme Court is part of a broader effort to solidify executive authority, with the high court — now dominated by a conservative supermajority, including three justices appointed by Trump — possibly receptive to these arguments. The Supreme Court has signaled in past rulings that it is open to expanding presidential powers, particularly under the “unitary executive theory,” which asserts that the president has the sole authority to hire and fire agency employees and direct their policies.
The “Supreme Court has been trending in his direction,” Daniel Suhr, president of the conservative public interest law firm Center for American Rights, told the Washington Post earlier this month. “The court over the past 10 to 15 years … has certainly been laying the foundation stones to recognize presidential authority over the executive branch.”
One of the most consequential rulings in this trend came in July 2024, when the Supreme Court granted then-candidate Trump’s sweeping immunity from prosecution for official acts, a case that stemmed from one of his two federal indictments issued by former special counsel Jack Smith. Roberts wrote for the majority that “unlike anyone else,” the president “is a branch of government” and must be free from legal entanglements that could hinder executive action. That ruling was widely seen as reinforcing not just Trump, but any sitting president’s ability to exercise expansive control over the federal government.
Additional rulings have reinforced this trajectory. In 2020, the Supreme Court’s decision in Seila Law v. CFPB struck down restrictions on the president’s ability to fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Roberts, again writing for the majority, asserted that “the Constitution vests executive power—all of it—in the president.”
Legal scholars warn that these trends could erode critical checks on presidential power. David M. Driesen, a professor at the Syracuse College of Law, cautioned against the dangers of a judiciary that grants too much leeway to the executive branch. “It’s very, very dangerous to operate under the unitary executive theory when you have a president with autocratic tendencies,” he said. “If a president had control of prosecution, he could protect his friends and attack his enemies. If he controls the election commission, he can tilt elections in his favor.”
However, conservatives argue that the modern federal bureaucracy has become an unaccountable “fourth branch of government” that obstructs the will of democratically elected presidents. Trump’s allies contend that his legal battles aim to restore presidential authority as originally intended by the Constitution.
SCOTUS is a necessary stop after Democrats won lower court appointments
Trump’s legal battles have frequently been fought in the Washington, D.C., federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, both of which lean Democratic in their judicial makeup. As of 2025, seven of the 11 active judges on the D.C. Circuit and 12 of the 18 judges on the district court were appointed by Democratic presidents. The Supreme Court, by contrast, has a 6-3 majority of originalist judges named by Republicans, making it a slightly more favorable venue for Trump’s executive challenges, although not universally.
SUPREME COURT SIDES WITH TRUMP IN USAID FUNDING DISPUTE FOR NOW
At least 44 of the 94 lawsuits filed against Trump’s executive orders and actions have landed in the district court, emphasizing the administration’s frequent clashes with lower courts occupied by Democratic-appointed judges.
This has driven the administration’s strategy of pushing cases quickly to the Supreme Court, where it hopes to set new legal precedents that strengthen presidential power.
