Trump asks Supreme Court to strip judges of power to wipe out federal rules nationwide

The Trump administration filed a formal petition with the U.S. Supreme Court this week asking the justices to decide whether the Administrative Procedure Act lets a single federal judge void an agency regulation across the entire country. If the court takes the case and rules for the government, it would remove one of the most potent weapons that opponents of White House policy have used for the past two years.

The administration has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether and when a federal court can throw out an agency's action or rule in its entirety; Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the court to set limits on the authority of federal courts, telling the justices that nothing in the "text, context, or history" of the federal law governing administrative agencies "suggests that the statute vests courts with that 'new and far-reaching remedial power.'"

The petition, docketed October 14 and posted to the Supreme Court's public docket, arrives as the administration is fighting on dozens of simultaneous legal fronts ahead of the November 3 midterms.

What the case is actually about

The question comes to the court in a case that began as challenges to rules issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Labor, and the Department of the Treasury to implement parts of the No Surprises Act, a 2022 law intended to protect patients from surprise healthcare bills, particularly in emergencies or from out-of-network providers.

A federal district court in Texas ruled for the challengers, including the Texas Medical Association, a hospital, and four air ambulance companies, but a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reversed that ruling in part. The case then went to the full 5th Circuit, which vacated some of the challenged provisions. In an opinion joined by nine judges, the court of appeals rejected the government's argument that doing so would "create a host of practical problems," for example, that patients might lose some of the protections provided by the law while the rules are reformulated.

The administration's grievance is less about the No Surprises Act itself than about the remedy. The Trump administration says the APA's instruction to "set aside" agency actions does not give a license to a singular judge to strike down a federal policy in all 50 states. Sauer wrote in the petition that "universal vacatur upends that system, imbuing the orders of courts of first review with the type of nationwide effect usually reserved for the precedents of the court of last resort."

That last line matters. Two years ago, the Supreme Court's conservative majority curtailed the use of universal injunctions. Sauer is now pushing the court to do the same to universal vacatur, a closely related but technically distinct remedy that lower courts have continued to deploy. The justices are likely to consider taking up the case at a closed-door conference later this term. Sauer has warned that the current practice is forcing the administration to "run the table" in every court where it is sued, sometimes all across the country, and more frequently turn to the justices for emergency relief.

Why it connects to a broader legal campaign

The petition does not stand alone. It is the latest in a series of moves by the administration to limit what federal courts can do when they find an agency rule unlawful. The Trump administration is making its next move to rein in judges' authority to block the president's agenda.

That pattern is visible in the voter roll fight as well. A federal judge ruled earlier this month that the Justice Department's push to obtain state voter rolls and check them against a federal immigration database to demand that states remove voters it deemed ineligible was unlawful. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled the Justice Department's use of state voter rolls with the SAVE immigration database unlawful in Washington.

In a 78-page decision siding with a challenge brought by watchdog group Common Cause, Sooknanan wrote that the Justice Department had downplayed the risk that its practice would wrongfully disenfranchise eligible U.S. citizens despite evidence that the immigration database, known as SAVE, could be inaccurate.

Over the past year, the DOJ has demanded full, unredacted voter rolls from 49 states and Washington, D.C. These records vary by state but include sensitive personal data like home addresses, Social Security numbers, and voting history. The agency intended to compare state voter list data with the DHS's SAVE system in an effort to identify suspected noncitizens on state voter rolls and demand that states revoke their voter registration.

That ruling, though, sits in an awkward posture. The Supreme Court on September 25 lifted restrictions on a controversial federal voter database before November's elections, granting President Donald Trump a temporary win in his aggressive campaign against noncitizen voting. The court's three liberal-leaning justices publicly dissented from the decision. In other words, the same justices the administration is now asking to curtail "universal vacatur" have already, in a related dispute, vacated a lower court's block on SAVE. Both threads run through the same courthouse and, potentially, the same conference room.

The APA petition's stakes

The Trump administration is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to decide whether the Administrative Procedure Act allows federal judges to universally vacate agency rules, in what could be a major test of the judiciary's authority to check executive agency power.

The question presented in the petition, taken directly from the government's filing, is: whether the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. 701 et seq., authorizes courts, in Section 706(2), to enter universal vacatur of agency rules that courts have held unlawful, and if so, in what circumstances.

The administration's answer is no. The petition argues the APA does not authorize such sweeping relief. Even if the APA authorized universal vacatur in some circumstances, universal vacatur would certainly not be an appropriate "default" remedy.

For regulated industries, hospital systems, environmental groups, labor unions, and anyone else who has ever won a court ruling wiping out a federal rule they disliked, the stakes are immediate. A ruling for the government would mean that winning in court no longer automatically means the rule disappears everywhere. Plaintiffs would instead get relief only for themselves, leaving the same rule in force for everyone else until appeals work through.

In rejecting the government's position at the circuit level, the en banc 5th Circuit noted the administration's concern about "a host of practical problems." Sauer countered that universal vacatur also "has harmful consequences for the courts themselves," because when an action or a rule is vacated nationwide, the government will often have to seek emergency relief, which "forces courts to resolve significant and difficult questions of law on a highly expedited basis and without full briefing."

That argument cuts two ways. Critics of the administration's position note that limiting vacatur to named plaintiffs only creates a different chaos: regulated parties with identical legal rights living under different rules depending on whether they happened to join a lawsuit. That conflict among affected parties, not addressed in the petition, is one reason the justices may find the case a close call even if they grant review.

The Supreme Court accepted three new cases for argument on October 13, adding to its oral argument docket and agreeing to decide, among other things, what kinds of orders trial courts can issue in disputes over access to government information and whether working as a cook in a camp run by violent separatists qualifies as providing "material support" for terrorism under federal immigration law. The APA vacatur petition is not yet on that argument calendar. The justices are likely to consider taking up the case at a closed-door conference later this term.

The administration also separately asked the justices this week to determine courts' ability to vacate federal agency actions in related filings, reflecting a coordinated push across multiple dockets to get the court to address the same underlying remedies question from different angles.

What to Watch

• Whether the Supreme Court schedules the APA vacatur petition for conference, likely in late October or November, and whether it grants certiorari for the 2026-27 term's argument calendar.
• How the DOJ responds to Judge Sooknanan's October 9 voter roll ruling, and whether the administration again seeks an emergency stay from the Supreme Court ahead of November 3.
• Whether any sitting justice, at oral argument in another case this term, signals a view on Section 706(2) relief before the vacatur petition is formally accepted or denied.
• The Congressional response: no legislation limiting courts' equitable remedies under the APA has advanced out of committee, but the petition could revive that conversation in a lame-duck session, depending on midterm results.

Sources: SCOTUSblog (Amy Howe, Oct. 16, 2026) | The Hill (Oct. 16, 2026) | Law360 (Jared Foretek, Oct. 15, 2026) | Supreme Court docket, No. 26-491 (primary source) | Common Cause press release, Oct. 9, 2026 | Reuters via Missouri Lawyers Media (Luc Cohen, Oct. 12, 2026) | SCOTUSblog, Oct. 13, 2026