President Trump’s efforts to help America and drain the swamp are being hampered and even outright stopped at every turn by judges across the nation. Who are the groups funding these court cases?

From The Daily Signal. President Donald Trump has entered Washington like a bull in a China shop, shattering the Mandarin norms of the administrative state in order to undermine the deep state, but the bureaucrats are fighting back.

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A bevy of leftist organizations—mostly unions and woke pressure groups—have proved themselves deep state allies by filing lawsuits to block Trump’s orders, and some have convinced federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions purporting to tie Trump’s hands.

On Monday, six judges blocked his policies, following nine orders in the previous two weeks.

Judges have ordered the administration to halt its freeze on federal spending, to rehire a special counsel, to restore deleted websites, to refrain from giving the Department of Government Efficiency access to federal records, and even to engage in a granular change—to reverse its move to slash to 15% the funding available for overhead in National Institutes of Health research grants. These orders raise the question of whether Trump truly is president and whether he has the authority to reform the federal government.

While Trump said he will “always abide by the courts,” he warned that any injunction “gives crooked people more time to cover up the books.”

Yet even the most activist judge can’t issue an injunction unless someone brings a case, and filing lawsuits costs money. That raises the question: Who are the deep state allies filing these cases in the first place?

Exhibit A: The Federal Buyout

While many judges have granted the activists the injunctions they want, one Democrat-appointed judge has refused to dignify their obstruction.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge George O’Toole, a Clinton appointee, ruled that four unions—the American Federation of Government Employees; a local American Federation of Government Employees union; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; and the National Association of Government Employees—lacked standing to sue the Trump administration to block Trump’s offer of “deferred resignation” for federal employees.

On Jan. 28, the Office of Personnel Management sent a memo allowing federal employees to accept what it called “deferred resignation.” As long as they resigned by Feb. 6, bureaucrats could remain on administrative leave with pay and benefits through Sept. 30, the last day of the 2025 fiscal year, which would become their last day of employment.

While the offer ostensibly allows bureaucrats an off-ramp if they refuse to stop working from home and return to work in the office, it may also represent a positive opening bid for bureaucrats who might otherwise seek to oppose Trump’s agenda from within the administrative state to leave. A recent poll found that 64% of Washington, D.C.-based federal employees who voted for Kamala Harris in November say they will refuse a lawful Trump order if they consider it bad policy. Trump aims to prevent this deep state from growing.

The unions sued over the deferred resignation offer, and after temporarily blocking the Feb. 6 deadline, O’Toole ruled that “the unions lack standing to challenge the directive.”

“Standing requires the plaintiffs to be more than ‘mere bystander[s]’ and instead requires a ‘personal stake in the dispute,’” he wrote, citing a 2024 Supreme Court case. “Further, the Supreme Court recently held that an organization that is not directly affected by an agency’s actions cannot establish standing simply by ‘divert[ing] its resources in response to a defendant’s actions.”

“The plaintiffs cannot manufacture standing through self-inflicted harms,” the judge explained.

Why ‘Manufacture Standing’?

The AFGE represents 800,000 federal employees, and its natural interests lie with the bureaucratic status quo. The AFGE has vehemently opposed Trump’s reforms to weaken the administrative state because if Trump succeeds in streamlining the federal government and making it more efficient, the AFGE will be less necessary.

The AFGE is part of the AFL-CIO, America’s largest union. The AFL-CIO enjoyed access to the Biden White House and directed cash to the Left’s dark money network, particularly to shadowy nonprofits created by the for-profit company Arabella Advisors.

The AFL-CIO, AFSCME, and Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, form part of the dark money and influence campaign that staffed and advised the Biden administration. This influence campaign pushed the bureaucracy to champion critical race theory (the belief that America is systemically racist against blacks and in favor of whites), gender ideology, climate alarmism, and a preference for technocratic government.

I call the network of these activist groups “the Woketopus,” and they are the subject of my new book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government.” Many of the lawsuits involve at least one of the activist groups I expose in the book.

The Woketopus has lost its influence in the White House, so it’s fighting for the next best thing—to prevent Trump from unraveling the administrative state that gave it power in the first place.

A Judicial Attempted Coup

Most of the federal rules Americans must live by are not passed by Congress but issued as regulations from one of the 438 “alphabet soup” agencies in the federal government—be it the ATF, the FDA, the NSA, the TSA, and so on and so forth. In 2022, for example, Congress passed 247 laws while agencies promulgated 3,168 rules and published 80,756 pages of those rules in the Federal Register.

The federal government employs about 2.4 million people, not counting active-duty military and Postal Service employees. According to the Constitution, those employees all answer to the president as head of the executive branch, but thanks to public sector unions and “civil service” protections, the president has difficulty firing them for poor performance or insubordination. Thus, the deep state opposition to the people’s elected president becomes a possibility.

The Left has weaponized this administrative bureaucracy, and that’s a prime reason why Trump wants to cut it down to size.

Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency started with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which has funded woke projects around the world. The administration has highlighted USAID grants of $1.5 million to advance “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in Serbia’s workplaces and $47,000 for a transgender opera in Colombia, among other examples. The USAID grants also dovetail with the foreign funding of the Open Society Foundations, a nonprofit founded by Hungarian American billionaire George Soros that helps fund the Woketopus.

My book explains how nonprofits like the American Federation of Teachers, the Human Rights Campaign, the American Civil Liberties Union, and others fed their staff members into federal agencies, wrote policy recommendations for the agencies, and worked closely with the administration to get their priorities enshrined into regulations that often have the force of law.

No wonder these same groups are now trying to use the courts to stop Trump’s reforms!

For instance, the American Federation of Teachers is suing to block the Treasury Department, the Department of Education, and the Office of Personnel Management from sharing documents with the DOGE.

The Human Rights Campaign is suing to force the military to kowtow to gender ideology after Trump issued an executive order declaring that clinically-diagnosed gender confusion will disqualify someone from military service.

The American Civil Liberties Union is suing to block Trump’s order preventing taxpayer funding from paying for experimental transgender medical interventions. The ACLU is also suing to block Trump’s order interpreting the 14th Amendment the way it was originally intended rather than granting U.S. citizenship to “anchor babies.” The ACLU is also suing to block Trump’s order to fast-track deportations of illegal aliens.

The AFGE has touted its lawsuits: the one blocking Trump’s employee buyout order; another challenging the constitutionality of the original version of the DOGE; another challenging Trump’s Schedule F order that makes it easier for the president to fire bureaucrats; and another attempting to prevent federal agencies from sharing information with the DOGE.

The AFGE also filed a lawsuit to block Trump’s USAID reforms, and a judge blocked the USAID from placing 4,000 employees on leave. In that case, however, the judge also pressed the unions to prove their standing to sue, suggesting this lawsuit may face the same fate as the suit over Trump’s buyout order.

Democrat state attorneys general have also filed lawsuits, but unions like the AFGE are largely leading the charge.

The law firm Democracy Forward—headed by Democrat lawyer Marc Elias, who attempted to reverse the 2024 election results in the U.S. Senate race in Pennsylvania—has boasted of providing legal representation for nine of the lawsuits against Trump, many involving the AFGE.

Make no mistake: These groups are the allies of the deep state, and they’re working overtime to shore up the woke bureaucracy.

While Trump has moved quickly and aggressively, as president he should have the authority to control the executive branch. These lawsuits amount to an attempted coup by judicial fiat, and the same influence campaign that pushed woke orthodoxy on America under President Joe Biden is now screaming to high heaven as Trump attempts to dismantle its control on Washington.

If the democratically elected president cannot fulfill his promises to the American people by changing the administrative state, that raises the question whether America truly is a republic, or merely a bureaucracy.

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Originally published at The Daily Signal. Used with permission. Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America – Donald Trump, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95662264.