In early 2025, at least 30 legal challenges to President Donald Trump’s agenda cited the same statute. It was not a new law. President Harry Truman signed the Administrative Procedure Act on June 11, 1946.
The act, Pub. L. 79-404, sets the rules for how federal agencies write regulations, and it gives federal courts oversight of what they do. Scholars Hickman and Pierce call it one of the most important pieces of U.S. administrative law, a kind of “constitution” for the field. It applies to executive departments and independent agencies alike, and it sits in Title 5 of the U.S. Code, beginning at Section 500.
Born in a New Deal fight
Starting in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and a Democratic Congress created a run of new federal agencies to deal with the Great Depression. Congress soon grew uneasy about how much power those agencies held. Roosevelt himself warned that bodies able to make law and judge cases “threatens to develop a fourth branch of government for which there is no sanction in the Constitution.”
In 1939 he asked Attorney General Frank Murphy to assemble a committee to study agency practice. Its Final Report counted nine executive departments and eighteen independent agencies, 51 agencies in all once subdivisions were included. Congress put the matter aside as the country moved toward World War II, then took it up again and passed the act. A 1946 House report spoke of ten years of “painstaking and detailed study and drafting.”
Professor George Shepard describes the fight as a “pitched political battle for the life of the New Deal” itself. The compromise, he wrote, reflected “the nation’s decision to permit extensive government, but to avoid dictatorship and central planning.” Senator Pat McCarran called the law “a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated” by federal agencies.
What the law demands
Agencies have to tell the public how they are organized and what their rules are, take public comment on rulemaking, follow uniform standards for formal proceedings and accept judicial review. Courts can set aside a regulation that is “arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with the law.” Formal, trial-like decisions face a tougher test: they must rest on “substantial evidence” in the whole record.
Section 702 lets people sue a federal agency for non-monetary relief, such as an injunction. Congress, the federal courts and territorial governments are outside the definition of an agency, and courts have held that the president is not one either. Each state has its own version, and the federal act does not require the systematic pre-adoption review of regulations found in the Model State Administrative Procedure Act.
The act in Trump’s second term
The Independent reported in February 2025 that many of Trump’s signature actions had drawn court challenges, and that complaints quickly turned to the 1946 law. One suit from government contractors, over the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and a pause in foreign aid, said the moves “violate basic precepts of administrative law.” Another challenged a buyout offer to thousands of federal employees. Others involved a rollback of prison-rape protections and an immigration directive that had barred raids at places like churches.
Loyola Marymount law professor Justin Leavitt said Congress told agencies in 1946 to be careful and to “consider all aspects of the problem.” The law also stopped parts of Trump’s first-term agenda, including a citizenship question on the census and an effort to end protections for “Dreamer” migrants.
Whether it will hold this time is uncertain. The Supreme Court now has a 6-to-3 conservative majority, which makes appeals easier for the president to win. Georgetown law professor David Super wrote that the administration “is acting so rapidly, and with so little transparency, that considerable damage may be done before anyone outside knows and can get into court.” Vice President JD Vance had suggested days earlier that federal courts “aren’t allowed” to limit the White House’s “legitimate power.” Trump said later that day he would always “abide” by court rulings.
Sources
- Administrative Procedure Act – Wikipedia
- How the obscure Administrative Procedure Act could stop Trump’s government overhaul
- Administrative Procedure Act
