Published April 5, 2025
The Supreme Court finally stood athwart the single-party district courts running riot and yelled “STOP!” In a case involving the termination of various Department of Education DEI grants, the Court stayed the temporary restraining order (TRO) from the District of Massachusetts requiring the government to pay its past-due and continuing grant obligations. Or, as the Court called it, “what [the district court] styled as a temporary restraining order.”
These Lilliputian TROs are, of course, no such thing. They are preliminary injunctions (PIs) dressed up as TROs to avoid appealability. Here, for example, the goal was clearly to force money out the door that the government would never see again, without any possibility of appeal. As the Court noted in its brief opinion, “No grantee ‘promised to return withdrawn funds should its grant termination be reinstated,’ and the District Court declined to impose bond.”
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Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the Constitution, the Courts, and the Culture Program, where he writes and speaks on issues relating to the law, the federal judiciary, and Congress. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Review, The Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy: Per Curiam, and elsewhere.
