President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has asked the US Supreme Court to restrict a tool federal judges use to cancel agency regulations for everyone, not just the people who sued. The appeal, now pending before the justices, targets the courts’ long-standing power to halt the actions of federal agencies that carry out the Republican president’s policy priorities. The Supreme Court is expected to consider whether to take up the case early next year.
The request follows a win the administration secured in June 2025, when the court limited nationwide injunctions. That ruling left a separate tool untouched, and the new appeal goes after it.
What the administration is asking for
The administration argues that courts should not be able to shut down an agency’s regulation entirely. Judges, it says, should limit any relief to the specific plaintiffs in a given case.
The Justice Department put its position directly in its filing. The Supreme Court “should return the lower courts to their proper role under the Administrative Procedure Act,” it said.
The administration made the same argument against universal injunctions. It contends that the law does not give courts such sweeping authority, and that the most a court can do is block a regulation’s enforcement against the plaintiffs who challenged it.
The tool at the center of the appeal
The lawsuits the administration is targeting are brought under the Administrative Procedure Act, known as the APA. Congress passed it in 1946, and it governs how federal agencies operate, including how they put regulations into effect.
Judges and appeals courts have long claimed the power under the APA to “hold unlawful and set aside” agency regulations they find illegal. A ruling of that kind invalidates the regulation on a universal basis. It does not stop at the courtroom door of the people who filed suit.
That is different from the nationwide injunctions the Supreme Court restricted in June 2025. Those orders can block the government from enforcing a policy against anyone, not only the challengers. Judges had used them more and more in a wide range of cases against Trump, including cases alleging violations of the US Constitution. The administration now wants the same limits applied to the similar orders judges can issue to invalidate policies under the APA.
A case about surprise medical bills
The vehicle for the appeal is a challenge by Texas medical providers to federal rules that implement a statute Trump signed into law during his first term. The statute aims to limit unexpected medical bills.
The regulation at issue sought to constrain “surprise” bills from hospitals and health providers outside a patient’s health insurance network. A Texas association of medical doctors, air-ambulance providers and other plaintiffs argued that the rule violated the APA and artificially lowered their insurance reimbursement rates.
The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals voided parts of the rule nationwide in August, finding an APA violation. The administration’s appeal does not contest that finding about the rule’s legality. It asks a narrower question: whether courts can use the APA to stop a policy nationwide at all.
Two readings of the same words
The dispute comes down to what the APA’s language allows. Judges point to the phrase “hold unlawful and set aside” when they invalidate a rule for everyone. The administration reads the statute as permitting relief only for the plaintiffs in front of the court. Judges and appeals courts have read it the other way for a long time.
The Supreme Court did not resolve that disagreement in 2023, when Biden’s administration invited it to. The justices backed Biden in that case on other grounds, so the question comes back to them now in a new case, under a different president.
What a win would change
Aditya Bamzai, a University of Virginia expert in administrative law, said a victory for Trump could let the government keep enforcing rules against everyone except the plaintiffs in a given case. That could continue for years while litigation plays out, even after judges have deemed the rules unlawful.
Siding with Trump “would give more flexibility to the executive branch,” Bamzai said.
“Whether you like or dislike that flexibility can perhaps depend on whether you like or dislike a particular administration’s policies,” Bamzai added.
Ronald Levin, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, described the practical effect from the other side. If the Supreme Court agrees with the administration, he said, “it would take longer for challengers to get unlawful regulations removed from the books.”
The case for keeping the tool
Numerous state governments that regularly sue the federal government say this judicial power is an essential check against executive overreach. Others say the APA matters because it keeps regulations uniform and applies them equally to everyone.
Levin gave examples. “When an agency adopts a rule that has been held to be unlawful, sometimes the only sensible solution is to wipe it off the books,” he said.
“You can’t have a food-safety rule that applies only to some. You can’t have an auto-safety manufacturing rule that applies only to some manufacturers,” Levin said. He added that judges should not use the tool in every case, but, in his words, “there are some cases where the need for it is compelling.”
Texas, Florida and some other states, mostly led by Republicans, had urged the 5th Circuit not to “neuter” the APA’s effectiveness. They called the law important for maintaining the balance of power between states and the federal government. “The APA is a critical tool … to curb federal overreach and incursions into state sovereignty by executive-branch agencies,” these states said.
Trump’s administration may face pushback from a broad array of opponents on this effort, and the Republican-led states in that group show that the objection does not come from one side only.
Cases that depend on the tool
Since Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has faced hundreds of lawsuits over its actions on immigration, mass deportation, diversity initiatives and transgender rights, among others. Many of those actions pushed the boundaries of presidential authority.
Plaintiffs invoked the APA in numerous cases. They used it to fight the termination of humanitarian legal status for hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the United States. They used it against major cuts to research grants related to racial minorities or LGBT people. They used it against the use of a mass voter verification system to conduct sweeping citizenship checks.
Trump and his allies have attacked judges who stood in the way of those policies, calling some of them radical or corrupt. At the same time, the president has tested the limits of his powers.
What the 2025 ruling did and did not decide
The June 2025 ruling came in litigation over Trump’s bid to limit birthright citizenship, a right long recognized in the United States. The ruling addressed judicial power, not whether the birthright citizenship directive was legal.
The legality question came separately. In June, the justices issued a 6-3 ruling rejecting Trump’s birthright citizenship policy as unconstitutional.
The administration is not the first to ask for limits on judges’ power. President Joe Biden’s administration also asked the Supreme Court to rein in universal injunctions when lower courts hindered many of his main initiatives. The 2025 ruling still proved to be a major victory for Trump.
Biden’s administration also tried in 2023 to persuade the Supreme Court to limit the APA power that the new appeal targets. That case involved a challenge by Republican attorneys general from Texas and Louisiana to an immigration policy. The justices did not take up the invitation and backed Biden on other grounds.
What happens next
The justices will decide, probably early next year, whether to hear the case. If they do, the question before them will be narrow in form and broad in effect. They will not rule on the surprise-billing rule itself, since the administration has left the 5th Circuit’s finding about it alone. They will rule on whether a federal judge can cancel an agency rule for everyone.
For the administration, a yes would add to the 2025 ruling and leave judges with fewer ways to stop a policy before a case ends. For challengers, it would mean a rule found unlawful could stay in force against everyone except the plaintiffs, as Bamzai and Levin described. Both men tied the outcome to time: how long an unlawful rule can remain on the books while the case continues.
Bamzai’s remark about liking or disliking an administration’s policies also points to a feature of the case that does not depend on party. Whatever the justices decide would apply to whichever administration holds office next. Biden’s team asked for similar limits on judges, which is why the question has now come up under two presidents of opposite parties.
