Among the many judges who struck down Trump administration efforts during its first year, one judge clashed most frequently with the president on central policy issues.
Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama-appointee in Washington, D.C., stands out for the number of rulings she’s issued blocking presidential actions, including attempts to fire agency heads and cut federal grants and contracts, while making headlines for pointed criticism of the administration in her opinions and facing frequent reversal on appeal.
Only a few days into President Donald Trump’s second term, Howell declared that she “cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed” in the president’s proclamation pardoning Jan. 6 defendants, many of them cases she presided over.
“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” she wrote. “No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity.”
Federal prosecutors tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent Howell in March from hearing a challenge to one of Trump’s executive orders based on rulings that “repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the President,” even before he took office. They cited her decision to greenlight former special counsel Jack Smith’s request to secretly search Trump’s Twitter account.
Howell slammed the attempt, defending her rulings as following “the facts and the law.”
“When the U.S. Department of Justice engages in this rhetorical strategy of ad hominem attack, the stakes become much larger than only the reputation of the targeted federal judge,” Howell wrote in March. “This strategy is designed to impugn the integrity of the federal judicial system and blame any loss on the decision-maker rather than fallacies in the substantive legal arguments presented.”
Howell proceeded to block enforcement in May of Trump’s order against the law firm Perkins Coie, which ordered agencies to review contracts with the firm while suspending employees’ security clearances and limiting their access to government buildings. Perkin Coie represented Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: ‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,’” Howell wrote in a May 2 ruling.
The administration is appealing Howell’s decision. The D.C. District Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“With well over 20 Supreme Court victories, the Trump Administration’s policies have been consistently upheld by the Supreme Court as lawful despite an unprecedented number of legal challenges and unlawful lower court rulings,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to the DCNF. “What the American people should be deeply concerned about is the rampant increase in judicial activism from radical left-wing judges. If this trend continues it threatens to undermine the rule-of-law for all future presidencies. The President will continue implementing the policy agenda that the American people voted for in November and will continue to be vindicated by higher courts when liberal activist judges attempt to intervene.”
‘Not A King’
The Supreme Court put Howell’s decision to block Trump from removing Democrat National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox on hold in May. The justices heard oral arguments in December to consider the broader question of the president’s ability to fire members of “independent” multi-member coalitions.
“An American President is not a king — not even an ‘elected’ one — and his power to remove federal officers and honest civil servants like plaintiff is not absolute,” Howell argued in March.
Howell also deemed Trump’s efforts to dismantle the U.S. Institute of Peace unlawful in May, but her decision was later reversed by the D.C. Circuit.
“As a general rule, the President may remove executive officers at will,” a three-judge panel wrote in reversing Howell’s decision.
Howell sided with Planned Parenthood in October, blocking a requirement for teen pregnancy prevention grant recipients to comply with Trump’s executive orders on gender ideology and stop indoctrination of children with “radical ideologies.” She required the administration to restore terminated Department of Agriculture grants in August.
In December, she issued a ruling restricting agents’ ability to arrest suspected illegal aliens without a warrant in Washington, D.C.
“Put simply, immigration enforcement officers may conduct a warrantless civil immigration arrest only if they have probable cause to believe that a person is both in the United States unlawfully and an escape risk,” she wrote.
Her decision appears “to ignore a 1984 Supreme Court opinion and blow past limitations Congress placed on the lowest rung of the federal judiciary in immigration matters,” according to Center for Immigration Studies Resident Fellow Andrew Arthur.
Howell did close out 2025 with one decision in Trump’s favor, allowing the president to impose a $100,000 fee for H-1B visa petitions.
Yet Howell directed the administration on Sunday to restore nearly $12 million in grant funding to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), finding a likely “retaliatory motive” for cutting the funds.
AAP claimed the grants were cut over its public opposition to Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policies, noting the terminated grants covered “a range of issue areas such as to reduce sudden unexpected infant death, improve rural access to pediatric care, address youth and adolescent mental health, support children with birth defects, identify autism earlier, identify newborns and infants who are deaf and hard of hearing, and prevent fetal alcohol spectrum disorders.”
“This is not a case about whether AAP or HHS is right or even has the better position on vaccinations and gender-affirming care for children, or any other public health policy,” Howell wrote. “This is a case about whether the federal government has exercised power in a manner designed to chill public health policy debate by retaliating against a leading and generally trusted pediatrician member professional organization focused on improving the health of children.”
HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart wrote on X that the funding was cut because it “didn’t align with HHS’s mission or priorities.”
“The arrogance behind this lawsuit is staggering — AAP seems to believe it’s their money to spend as they please,” he wrote Dec. 27. “Wrong! It’s our money, and it’s HHS’s duty to protect taxpayers from wasteful spending.”
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