Last year’s Administrative Procedure Act opinion appears to remain intact after today’s Supreme Court ruling
Friday, Jun 27, 2025 – Posted by Rich Miller
In a highly anticipated ruling on Friday, the Supreme Court put a partial end to the use of nationwide injunctions from federal courts limiting the decisions of the executive branch.
The 6-3 ruling, written by Coney Barrett, stemmed from Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship, which dictates that everyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
But the decision could have much broader implications, as Trump has long claimed that the courts are overstepping their authority by handing down “nationwide” orders that have temporarily blocked some of his policies.
In her opinion, Coney Barrett wrote: “Some say that the universal injunction ‘give[s] the Judiciary a powerful tool to check the Executive Branch.’ … But federal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”
* From the ruling…
The plaintiffs allege that the Executive Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, §1, and §201 of the Nationality Act of 1940. In each case, the District Court entered a “universal injunction” — an injunction barring executive officials from applying the Executive Order to anyone, not just the plaintiffs. And in each case, the Court of Appeals denied the Government’s request to stay the sweeping relief. The Government argues that the District Courts lacked equitable authority to impose universal relief and has filed three nearly identical emergency applications seeking partial stays to limit the preliminary injunctions to the plaintiffs in each case. The applications do not raise — and thus the Court does not address — the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act. Instead, the issue the Court decides is whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions.
And the 6-3 majority did, indeed, rule that no such authority exists.
* However, this is also in the majority ruling…
Nothing we say today resolves the distinct question whether the Administrative Procedure Act authorizes federal courts to vacate federal agency action. See 5 U. S. C. §706(2) (authorizing courts to “hold unlawful and set aside agency action”).
* Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence…
And in cases under the Administrative Procedure Act, plaintiffs may ask a court to preliminarily “set aside” a new agency rule. 5 U. S. C. §706(2); see, e.g., West Virginia v. EPA, 577 U. S. 1126 (2016); see also Corner Post, Inc. v. Board of Governors, 603 U. S. 799, 826-843 (2024)
* Why is this important? Because, as I explained to subscribers in April, the Administrative Procedure Act is at the core of most of the lawsuits filed by attorneys general against the Trump administration.
Some context from last year…
In a major ruling, the Supreme Court on Friday cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely on their own interpretion of ambiguous laws. The decision will likely have far-reaching effects across the country, from environmental regulation to healthcare costs.
By a vote of 6-3, the justices overruled their landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which gave rise to the doctrine known as the Chevron doctrine. Under that doctrine, if Congress has not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable. But in a 35-page ruling by Chief Justice John Roberts, the justices rejected that doctrine, calling it “fundamentally misguided.” […]
Chevron deference, Roberts explained in his opinion for the court on Friday, is inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that sets out the procedures that federal agencies must follow as well as instructions for courts to review actions by those agencies. The APA, Roberts noted, directs courts to “decide legal questions by applying their own judgment” and therefore “makes clear that agency interpretations of statutes — like agency interpretations of the Constitution — are not entitled to deference. Under the APA,” Roberts concluded, “it thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”
From that landmark 2024 opinion…
And rather than safeguarding reliance interests, Chevron affirmatively destroys them by allowing agencies to change course even when Congress has given them no power to do so.
* NBC News picked up on the use of the APA against President Trump back in February…
Lawyers challenging President Donald Trump’s aggressive use of executive power in the courts are turning to a familiar weapon in their armory: an obscure but routinely invoked federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act.
While lawsuits challenging such provocative plans as ending birthright citizenship and dismantling federal agencies raise weighty constitutional issues, they also claim Trump failed to follow the correct procedures as required under the wonky 1946 statute. […]
Known in abbreviated form as the APA, the law allows judges to throw out federal agency actions that are “arbitrary and capricious” on various grounds, including failing to articulate why the agencies are changing policy.
* Isabel and I went through Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s press releases and court filings at the time to see which legal actions invoked the Administrative Procedure Act. There was a lot…
* But, as Justice Sotomayor’s dissent explains, the majority failed to see that the Administrative Procedure Act is at the core of the universal injunctions beginning in the third quarter of the 20th Century…
