After a federal judge barred Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from continuing to access Treasury Department payment systems, Trumpworld lashed out.
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vice President JD Vance wrote Sunday.
“No judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision,” President Donald Trump later told reporters on Air Force One, referring to the Treasury Department case.
And on his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), Musk reposted a user who wrote of the ruling: “I don’t like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I’m just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us if they’re going to blatantly disregard the constitution for their own partisan political goals?”
Based on that rhetoric, the country could soon be on the brink of a constitutional crisis, experts say. Though the executive branch has aggressively challenged the authority of the nation’s courts in American history, comparable examples are few and far between.
It was inaccurate and “insincere” to claim the courts have no role to play in executive actions, Douglas Keith, senior counsel for the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center told HuffPost Tuesday.
“No lawyer actually believes the court isn’t responsible for ensuring a check on other branches of government. There is clear constitutional authority,” Keith said.
The nation’s system of government hangs on a “delicate balance” between its three branches — and the Framers understood this, Keith said, noting there has historically been almost a “jealous guarding” of each branches’ authority.
What Trump, Vance and Musk are advocating for today is a “radical vision of the U.S. government,” he said, and one with no real legal precedent to speak of.
“It pushes aside the Constitution,” Keith remarked.
The administration’s blitz on the federal government — a campaign of massive, sudden spending freezes, widespread attacks on civil servants and the unprecedented vesture of power in Musk — has not done well in court so far.
Over and over, the Trump administration’s efforts have been hit with temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions from judges who, at least for now, have determined the White House is out of line.
Experts who spoke to HuffPost said they were troubled by the prospect of the administration appearing to build a precedent for ignoring court orders.
“Lots of the fights that they have picked — especially Musk’s out-of-control, rampant destruction of federal agencies from within — a lot of those fights they are not going to win in court,” said Thomas Keck, a professor of political science at Syracuse University. “So either they’re delusional about what judges will approve, or I think they have been planning from the beginning to try to get away with ignoring court decisions that go against them.”
The White House, however, is holding firm. “Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful,” Harrison Fields, principal deputy White House press secretary, told HuffPost in a statement.
“Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people,” he said.
‘Major Shift’
Several observers told HuffPost that if the Trump administration willfully violates any of the numerous restraining orders currently limiting its actions, it will spark a constitutional crisis.
“My question is, will the administration step back and begin to behave in a more conventional way, and fight these things out in the courts — and hope that they will eventually get vindication at the court of appeals level, or at the Supreme Court level? Or, are they going to violate temporary restraining orders and longer-term injunctions?” said Julie Novkov, a professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at SUNY Albany.
The latter, she added, “would be, definitely, a major shift in the way that we think about constitutional separation of powers and the authority of the branches.”
There are some signs the Trump administration is already not complying with judicial orders. On Monday, a federal judge said that the administration had violated his Jan. 31 order to distribute funding that has already been approved by Congress and signed into law by former President Joe Biden.
Judge John McConnell, the chief judge of the District Court of Rhode Island, wrote that state plaintiffs fighting the Trump freeze had “presented evidence … that the Defendants in some cases have continued to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds.” He did not buy the Trump administration’s justification for certain ongoing “pauses” — namely, that keeping some funding locked down is consistent with “a reasonable construction of that Order.”
And in a court filing Monday, a union and professional association representing USAID workers claimed that the White House has “not fully complied with the terms of this Court’s order” — alleging that several USAID employees who’d been locked out of computer systems had still not regained access, several days after the court granted plaintiffs’ motion for a temporary restraining order.
In a filing Tuesday, the administration said, “Unfortunately, the process of re-enabling users can be slow, manual, and error-prone.” A preliminary injunction hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
Right now, the fight is still working its way through the courts, but Keith emphasized that the onus will fall on anyone who cares about maintaining the nation’s system of checks and balances to “stand up and make clear, with whatever power or voice they have, that this will not stand and is not acceptable in our democracy.”
“There are many tools the courts can use to enforce their orders. They have contempt power, fines — very large fines — and they can arrest and threaten to arrest. But ultimately, the biggest power the courts have is the public’s expectations and demands that their officials will follow court orders. It will be essential to stand up,” he said.
‘Now Let Him Enforce It’
In the United States, the principle of “judicial review” — the concept that the courts can determine if actions by the executive or legislative branches are unconstitutional — is over 200 years old. It started with Marbury v. Madison, in 1803, when the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that an act of Congress was unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote in his opinion for the unanimous court: “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
Throughout history, presidents and others have occasionally challenged courts’ authority.
After the Supreme Court held in the 1832 case Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation was not subject to the state of Georgia’s laws, the state refused to honor the ruling. President Andrew Jackson ultimately directly defied the high court when he began the ethnic cleansing effort now known as the “Trail of Tears.” Years later, Jackson was quoted as having said, “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” though that quote is most likely apocryphal.
During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln ignored an opinion from Chief Justice Roger Taney, when Taney wrote for a circuit court that only Congress, not the president, could suspend habeas corpus.
Other examples are more limited: After the New Deal-era Supreme Court overturned several of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s programs, Roosevelt pushed a plan to pack the courts with his own appointees, watering down the power of the existing justices. The plan never came to fruition — but the court, seemingly reacting to that pressure, did allow more Roosevelt programs to stand.
In other instances, presidents have affirmatively enforced the court’s orders. When Southern state governors defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and refused to desegregate schools, then-President Dwight Eisenhower didn’t like the court’s decision — but still sent federal troops in to enforce the ruling.
“Now that history of governors defying the court’s orders is widely seen as one of the most shameful in our history,” Keith said.
The ‘Unitary Executive’
In recent decades, the conservative legal movement has argued for a broad expansion of presidential powers, particularly with regard to national security. This movement in favor of a “unitary executive” drives much of the thinking behind Project 2025, the right-wing policy plan that several people in Trump’s orbit helped author. For example, Trump is seeking the power to weaken employment protections for tens of thousands of federal workers, a move that appears to flow from the belief that each federal worker should personally answer to the president.
“They told us exactly what they were going to do,” Novkov said. “If you look at the front end of Project 2025, they talk a lot about concentrating power in the White House, and making sure that they have all of that authority tightly controlled and managed, and then expanding that authority to the maximum [extent] possible.”
Vance, in particular, has spoken openly about how Trump should ignore court orders if they come in conflict with this agenda.
“If I was giving [Trump] one piece of advice: Fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people,” Vance said on a podcast in 2021, before he was a senator.
“And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and then when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it.’”
Trump’s recent appeal of a judge’s order that unfroze federal funds has led Keith to believe the question of expanding the executive branch’s reach will likely end up at the Supreme Court.
With the high court’s ruling last year imbuing the president with broad legal immunity, Keith said Trump may be operating under the assumption that the justices will be quite “amenable” to his maneuvering — and that assumption may well be correct.
“That [immunity] decision sent a strong signal to Trump that the court would not uphold guardrails on the president’s activity in the ways that they had in the past,” he said.
Justices may not ultimately agree with every argument Trump makes under the banner of a unitary executive theory, but Keith worries they will nonetheless find a way to expand presidential powers.
This isn’t normal, he said.
“One thing to understand is that for 150 years, it has been well understood that presidents have to follow court orders. Presidents of both parties have followed court orders, even orders that they don’t agree with. Trump, in 2017, himself, after the travel ban was struck down in the courts across the country, complied with the order. [Former President Joe] Biden complied with an order striking down his power to cancel student debt. [Former President] George W. Bush, when he was being told people detained at Guantanamo [Bay] had a right to challenge their confinement — he said he would abide by the court’s decision even though he disagreed with it,” Keith said.
There’s a temptation, Keith added, to frame what Trump and his underlings are now doing as just more “norm-breaking.”
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“It’s much more than that,” he said. “It would be lawless and completely contrary to our history.”
Keck, the Syracuse professor, described Musk’s behavior — and Trump’s ceding of power to him — as an “attempted coup.” Prominent historians have used the same term.
“I think what’s happening now is an attempt to illegally seize governmental power,” Keck said. “You can’t abolish a federal agency created by Congress without Congress passing a law abolishing the agency. It’s so illegal. And its practical effects are that somebody with no lawful right to governmental power is exercising sweeping governmental power.”