Comment by rayiner

> Trump was, for example, famously able to implement what he called a "Muslim ban" - previous administration hires can't have been happy about that, yet I don't recall any stories about civil servants sabotaging the implementation of it.

Trump had to fire Sally Yates who refused to defend it in court: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/1/31/us-attorney-general.... There was no justification for her refusing to enforce the order. The legality of the order would be tested under rational basis review, which is extremely favorable to the government. And the case squarely implicated the President's authority over national security and the border. It wasn't a slam dunk for the government by any means, but it was way beyond the minimum "colorability" standard for the DOJ to make legal arguments to defend the order while complying with their ethical arguments.

> You mention case developments,

I mean not even updating political appointees about court rulings and such, hoping to keep the cases off the radars of the political appointees.

> as the administration has repeatedly found out recently, career staff are generally right when they identify something as a weak case the government can't possibly win.

The new administration has won quite a lot of cases. For example, with the funding cuts, the legal strategy was quite well developed. That's why you heard so much in the media about impoundment. Impoundment is what you start talking about when you have no argument that "the administration cannot make this specific cut." It's the argument that, "well, if the administration makes all these cuts, it's an impoundment problem because the administration needs to spend that money on something within the statutory scope." That's why many universities have settled with the administration. They know that, even if they can win on impoundment or something like that, they can't make the administration reinstate the grants to them specifically.

Similarly on affirmative action, the administration has pursued a strong strategy. The kind of affirmative action that was allowed in universities before SFFA was never permitted in employment. But lots of companies engaged in blatantly illegal conduct in adopting preferences or quotas for specific groups: https://www.cadwalader.com/quorum/index.php?nid=9&eid=35. Companies aren't even fighting the administration on this for the most part on that front.

The new administration certainly has had some losses. Part of that is that they're litigating like liberals--making aggressive arguments to push the boundaries of the law, knowing that it will lose a lot of cases. The other part is that the administration doesn't have "A" players in every position. For example on the tariffs, there were major weaknesses in the trial arguments.