Editorial illustration
Another unelected judge has decided they run the executive branch. According to a preliminary injunction issued by Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, a Biden-appointed federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from enforcing return-to-office requirements for Pentagon employees and other federal workers across the government.
Judge William Alsup, sitting in San Francisco, issued the ruling claiming the administration couldn’t force civilian Defense Department employees back to their desks, and the injunction extends government-wide, preventing the Office of Personnel Management from directing agencies to recall remote workers to their posts, as detailed in the court’s documents.
Think about what this means. The President of the United States, constitutionally charged with running the executive branch, can’t tell his own employees to show up for work, as Trump promised during his campaign to drain the swamp. A single district judge in California has decided that the administrative state answers to him, not to the voters who elected Trump.
The administration had been pushing to end the pandemic-era work-from-home arrangements that have become permanent fixtures for thousands of federal employees, with Trump administration officials stating in their press releases that taxpayers have been footing the bill for empty office buildings while bureaucrats collect full salaries from their kitchen tables. Trump campaigned on ending this abuse, and voters gave him a mandate based on his platform promises. But the judicial resistance continues, as conservative legal groups like the Heritage Foundation have noted in their analyses of similar nationwide injunctions.
This is the same playbook we’ve seen for months—activist judges in blue districts issuing nationwide injunctions to stop the administration’s agenda before it can even get started. The administration will undoubtedly appeal, but the damage is done: every day these injunctions remain in place is another day the administrative state operates as an unaccountable fiefdom, insulated from the democratic process and the President the Constitution puts in charge of it.
When did we decide that district judges get veto power over the executive branch? And how many more mandates from the American people will be nullified by judicial fiat before something gives?
Providence watches over the bold.
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