Public Citizen’s Legal Battle to Stop Trump’s Authoritarian Onslaught
Public Citizen News / March-April 2025
By Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert
This article appeared in the March/April 2025 edition of Public Citizen News. Download the full edition here.
We are confronting an authoritarian onslaught with no precedent in American history.
At Public Citizen, we think it is vital to be honest about the seriousness of this crisis moment. It’s equally crucial that we underscore that whether worst-case scenarios play out depends on what we – not Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions – do.
If we investigate and shine a light on Trump and Musk’s self-serving actions, if we build coalitions united to confront Trump’s authoritarianism, if we rally congressional leaders to stand up for the rule of law and against an agenda for the billionaires and giant corporations and, above all, if we mobilize people to take to the streets, we can stop our nation’s authoritarian slide.
An absolutely vital tool in this effort is litigation: Drawing on the unparalleled talents of Public Citizen’s Litigation Group, we are suing and suing and suing the Trump administration to block their illegal and unconstitutional actions.
Public Citizen Litigation Group has unmatched expertise and skill in areas relating to constitutional and administrative law. Based on our work during the first Trump administration, as well as our 50 years of experience, we were ready to respond to Trump II with a well-developed legal strategy. But Trump and Musk’s authoritarian rampage is more extreme than we anticipated. We have pivoted with a stepped up and aggressive litigation strategy designed to meet the moment.
Our eight cases filed in less than one month have:
- Blocked Trump and Musk from dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau;
- Restarted foreign aid grants, which Trump illegally ordered suspended;
- Forced the administration to repost health information it had stripped from the web (out of concern about the invented term of “gender ideology”); and
- Stopped Elon Musk’s DOGE efforts to arbitrarily block federal payments and to invade Americans’ data privacy at the U.S. Department of Treasury.
We have no illusions about how nefarious are the forces we’re up against or their willingness to circumvent or take bad-faith actions to evade court rulings.
But we also know that our tough litigation can hold them accountable.
One of our cases involves the administration’s illegal and devastating stoppage of all foreign aid. So much is at stake in this case. A global health expert inside the U.S. government estimated that if the aid stoppage is made permanent, it will result in 100,000 or more malaria deaths every year, a 28 percent increase in global TB cases and as many as 2 million deaths due to lack of immunization every year.
We sued over the foreign aid stoppage and won a temporary restraining order (TRO) requiring the administration to resume making payments on existing foreign assistance contracts. The administration simply refused, making up countless excuses. We obtained subsequent court orders and still the administration dallied. Then, the judge in our case ordered payments to resume within 36 hours, with no more excuses to be brooked.
The Trump gang took this order seriously. After an appellate court said it had no jurisdiction to review the district court, Trump lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, we won a 5-4 decision ordering the administration to comply with the district court. Although the majority did not explain their rationale, the angry dissent made plain what was at stake: Justice Alito and the three justices who joined with him were ready to rubber stamp the administration’s refusal to follow the district court’s order.
There’s no doubt that we’re going to lose some of the lawsuits we bring to challenge the administration’s illegal actions and some of those losses will feel devastating.
But there’s also no doubt we’re going to win, often. And just weeks into the administration, we’re already seeing how impactful – and lifesaving – those victories can be.
Along with the substantive wins, the cases are inspiring hope – hope that authoritarianism can be stopped, that fighting makes a difference, that something can be done.
In this way, the litigation is about more than the court cases and completely integrated into our overall advocacy effort. The litigation is not only about the rule of law, but also about overcoming fear, isolation and hopelessness, so that people connect and mobilize and build the power we need to defeat Trump.