A federal judge expressed unease about President Trump’s attempted takeover of yet another agency, yet indicated that he was inclined to let the firings stand, at least temporarily.
This time, the case stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the fired president of the U.S. African Development Foundation, where the Trump administration has attempted a startling new expansion of presidential power. That fired president, Ward Brehm, was seeking a temporary restraining order on Tuesday to restore him to his position while the litigation continues.
“I would say, at the moment, I’m inclined towards not granting the TRO,” U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said in his Washington D.C. courtroom at the end of the hearing.
Scattered gasps broke out in the courtroom, from the heavily agency-supportive crowd.
Leon then turned sternly to the table of government lawyers.
“I want to give the government fair notice: You’ve represented to this court in your pleading that the intentions of the government are to have a slimmed down version [of USADF],” he said. “This person who’s been making the representations to the DOJ are going to be required … to list and detail what steps were taken by the DOGE folks.”
He said that the person would have to appear in the courtroom and answer his questions.
“This shuttering concern that the plaintiffs have — I share that concern, although I don’t think it meets the standard of irreparable harm,” he added, referring to Brehm’s assertion that DOGE intends to take over the agency in order to shut it down.
It also contradicted the skepticism he expressed throughout the hearing about the underlying power grab in the case. The president’s team, waving to some vague authority hidden in Article 2 of the Constitution, claims that he can appoint new board members without Senate confirmation even though this agency is exempted from the law that occasionally lets the president fill vacancies in that manner.
After purporting to fire the duly confirmed board, Trump installed Peter Marocco, the acting head of USAID who helped unravel it. Marocco then elected himself the board’s chair.
“Where is the president’s authority to appoint without Senate confirmation?” Leon asked the Justice Department lawyer. “How is that possible?”
“By what authority is Mr. Marocco appointing himself the president of the foundation?” he asked with increasing skepticism.
Brehm’s lawyers said in court that they would file for a preliminary injunction after the decision on the temporary restraining order.
The USADF case grabbed attention, even amid the slew of agency trampling, due to the dramatic confrontation Brehm described in his lawsuit. DOGE members, under the false pretenses of helping the agency streamline and modernize its technology, attempted a hostile takeover, complete with threats of force from the U.S. Marshals and Secret Service, according to the lawsuit.
The episode, though, like many in the Trump era, is not without comedic relief. One of the biggest factual fights in the early days of the case centered on whether the board members had received notice that Trump had fired them. All of them except Brehm said they never received any termination notice. The administration, on the other hand, attached the emails sent in late February to fire the members in their filings.
In a twist, it appears that the administration attempted to guess the board members’ emails, ultimately sending dismissals to accounts that may not exist at all, or belong to other people. They tried to send one to board member and former U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun at [email protected]. Brehm’s lawyers wrote that Braun doesn’t have a Gmail account.
Another email went awry, per the testimony of a member of agency management: “I do not believe that John Agwunobi ever had an official USADF email address. Even if he did, the email address in Exhibit 5—[email protected]—both misspells his last name and is addressed to a .org domain, not a .gov domain”
“Defendants were too impatient to find the actual contact information for the Board members,” Brehm’s lawyers wrote. “Instead, it appears that they took their best guess as to email addresses, hoping it would be sufficient to send termination notices to email addresses that were close enough. It wasn’t.”
