Thursday morning, March 6th, the count is up to 101 lawsuits. 5 since yesterday. Make that 8 now.
_______________________________
I've been using the Just Security Litigation Tracker to keep up with all the lawsuits that have been generated by Donald Trump's actions, and those of his administration. Today's count is 96. Here are some interesting ones.
Days ago an organic farming association sued the USDA for deleting information on climate change from their website. It's not all of it. You can still search for it on the website, but it looks like technical data showing climate change are gone.
Alaska and a whole bunch of people including Greenpeace, are challenging Trump's executive order that opens up 650 million acres of the U.S. continental shelf to oil and gas exploration. First page has Gulf of Mexico with a footnote that recognizes Trump's attempt to call it the Gulf of America, but they're just going to keep calling it the Gulf of Mexico throughout the whole document anyway.
CREW, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, is telling the government that DOGE doesn't exist. They're right. There's not a single thing about it's operation that is constitutionally provided. In the listing of defendants, the Administrator for DOGE is named John Doe. Then they list Elon Musk as just "in his official capacity c/o White House."
Two lawsuits by 16 FBI John Does over FBI review of FBI agents involved in the Jan.6th case.
Six lawsuits over DEIA and DEI.
The Associated Press case about their press credentials revoked because of still call it the Gulf of Mexico in their style book. First and Fifth Amendment case.
Three cases about ICE now going into houses of worship including the Quakers.
Ten cases involving birthright citizenship. Ten more involving other immigration issues. Three about. migrant transfers to Guantanomo.
Four cases over Schedule F federal employee reinstatement.
Six cases about the creation of D.O.G.E.
Twelve cases about disclosure of federal employee information.
Five about removal of independent agency heads.
Four on dismantling of USAID.
Two on actions at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Two on the firings of the Inspectors General.
Six dealing with trans.
You might think that these amount of cases piling up would cause a problem with the Department of Justice. Guess what? They're running out of lawyers.
The cases are being filed in federal U.S. District Courts around the country, not just in Washington D.C.
At a hearing about DOGE and why the DOJ lawyer wasn't better prepared to answer questions about Musk's role, Joshua Gardner said, "Since Jan. 20, we have received approximately 80 lawsuits and our staff at Justice Department's Federal Programs branch has been cut in half. We have about half the staff we had in November, and are working on expedited schedules."
When the judge asked him if he was not taking the case seriously he said, "It's just the opposite. I haven't had a day off since Jan. 20. We're working day and night."
The Federal Programs Branch says it is "headed by three directors, who oversee a staff of approximately 110 lawyers, and 25 support personnel."
Those staffers are then spread out over 12 litigation areas, including health and education, employment discrimination, national security, national defense and foreign policy.
Well, it's 96 cases now and approximately 55 lawyers handling them. This isn't working well for them. Bloomberg reported that they're scrambling now to get U.S. attorneys in other divisions to transfer over to the Federal Programs Branch.
At the same time, AG Pam Bondi issued a day one memo that said lawyers who don't advocate for Trump's policies would be terminated.
Several lawyers, speaking on condition of anonymity to offer candor, said there is no desire to advance arguments supporting what they called illegal White House directives.
It's now a war of attrition against the Trump administration's DOJ. Too many lawsuits and not enough lawyers to handle them because DOGE got half of them fired and who knows how many staff are left.
You can go to USAJOBS.gov, enter lawyer, and what city or state, and find that the government is looking for lawyers for all types of government agencies, not just the DOJ.
If you were an intelligent lawyer in the first place, you know you can make much more money in the private sector. The only people DOJ could attract now are MAGA lawyers. I'll bet that they are a rare breed, in comparison to a normal private practice lawyer. Why work on a government salary when you can make $350 an hour on up?
Trump is failing, and DOGE is helping him fail in court. Just had the Supreme Court rule against him about withholding funds.
The amount of lawsuits keeps going up almost every day. What happens when there just aren't enough lawyers to process the cases? Judges don't care about their workload. Judges might just start doing default rulings for the plaintiffs. Unknown. This has never happened before because we have never had such an anti-government government before.
Firing the top job holders, firing probationary employees that could have filled those jobs in the future, just shows the consequences of bad planning that is Elon Musk's credo.
Couldn't happen to a nicer government. Shakespeare said, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
Apparently they did.
