Legal standing to sue serves as ‘quick kill’ for the government, DOJ

When the Trump administration announced a buyout plan for federal workers, major labor unions rushed to a judge to try to stop it.

U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. blocked the unions near the start of the case. He ruled that the unions perhaps had a keen interest in the fate of their members but weren’t injured themselves.

In other words, they lacked legal “standing” to sue. A party must show sufficient injury to bring a lawsuit and have standing.

Some 90 lawsuits are challenging President Trump’s aggressive agenda. The first question each plaintiff must answer to the judge is why they should be allowed in the courthouse.

If a plaintiff has no standing, the judge does not have to rule on the issue at stake.

“If you win on standing, the case is over,” said Ernest Young, a law professor at Duke University. “It is a way to get a quick kill.”

Standing requires plaintiffs to show injury, that the defendant is responsible for that injury and that the court has a viable remedy.

“The key to establishing standing is showing that you are being or will likely be directly injured by the action that you are challenging,” said Curtis A. Bradley, a professor at the University of Chicago.

He said the unions were found to lack standing in the buyout case because the injury was too tenuous.

The unions argued that they had to pay to educate their members about the buyouts, but courts generally find that a party can’t achieve standing by spending money.

“The unions also argued that they would lose members as a result of the buyout, but the court thought that this potential harm was too speculative,” Mr. Bradley said.

During the first Trump administration, a judge dismissed on standing a lawsuit brought by Washington area hotels, restaurants and bars that said they were injured by competition with the president’s operation of the Trump International Hotel.

The Supreme Court has erected hurdles to defining an injury in recent years.

President Biden won at the Supreme Court in 2023 when the justices reasoned that Republican-led states lacked standing in their lawsuit over the administration’s efforts to silence social media posts on the 2020 election and COVID-19.

In a ruling that year involving the abortion pill mifepristone, the justices ruled that a pro-life group lacked standing to challenge the Food and Drug Administration’s decision-making.

A year earlier, the high court tightened rules on states’ ability to sue the federal government in a challenge Texas brought against the Biden administration’s immigration policies.

Bradford Mank, a law professor at the University of Cincinnati, said conservative justices also can disagree about whether a party is injured and has standing.

“These cases get complicated,” Mr. Mank said. “Just because you think something is bad policy doesn’t mean you can sue.”

Courts that have issued initial rulings on challenges to Mr. Trump’s executive actions have mostly ruled that the plaintiffs have standing. Many are federal employees who have been directly affected by firings.

States and nongovernmental organizations that receive federal assistance or grant money have also successfully claimed standing to challenge funding pauses.

Judges often disagree over standing.

One case involved federal employees who challenged the Office of Personnel Management’s creation of a single email address that could reach every government worker. The judge said the employees couldn’t show a concrete injury because their worries about hacking were speculative.

In a case involving labor unions that challenged the Trump administration’s access to personnel files at OPM and the Department of Education, the judge ruled that the unions did have standing to sue on behalf of their members.

The Justice Department had said there was no disclosure outside the government, so there was no actual injury, but U.S. District Judge Deborah L. Boardman said the law limits even internal government sharing.

She said invasions of privacy are sufficient to earn standing.

“The disclosure to unauthorized government employees suffices,” Judge Boardman wrote.