Matt Walsh: “The Trump administration should just ignore these judges and do what they're gonna do”
Walsh: “The judges are acting lawlessly. They have no actual authority to make these kinds of decisions.”
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From the February 11, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Matt Walsh Show
MATT WALSH (HOST): In other words, the first Trump administration tried to cut waste at the NIH, but Congress shut him down. They actually passed an appropriations bill that prevented him from cutting the administrative funding. And now, citing that appropriations law, a new lawsuit is trying to stop Trump again from cutting this waste.
And so far, the plan is working. The other day, a federal judge halted the NIH cuts with a preliminary injunction. And this has been happening constantly, as you may have noticed. Individual federal judges have also blocked the Treasury secretary's access to internal files, prevented DOGE's buyout offer for federal workers from going through, and attempted to block the closure of USAID. So it's clear that this will be a theme of the second Trump presidency as it was in the first one. Judges are gonna do everything they can to just overturn what voters want, which is for the executive branch to determine how the executive branch operates.
But already there are signs, most notably from JD Vance, that this administration recognizes that these judges are breaking the law and that their rulings may not be respected, which they shouldn't be. In particular, Vance wrote, quote, if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.
Now this is an approach that obviously shouldn't be necessary. If we had judges who respected the separation of powers, it wouldn't be an issue. But increasingly, unelected judges are telling the executive branch how to spend money and who to employ. That's not just unconstitutional, it's also unsustainable. There is zero popular political support for continuing these expenditures to corrupt agencies like NSF and the NIH, which is why the Trump administration should just ignore these judges and do what they're gonna do. They're — the judges are acting lawlessly. They have no actual authority to make these kinds of decisions.