The decision this week by Judge Christopher R. Cooper to hand President Trump a legal victory but denounce his wrecking-ball approach to government reform showed, if nothing else, the tensions confronting the federal bench in Washington.

Even as he admitted that the district courts might not always be the place to stop Mr. Trump’s bid, Judge Cooper, in a ruling issued on Thursday, acknowledged that the new administration had been marked so far by “an onslaught of executive actions” leading to “disruption and even chaos.” Chief among them, he wrote, were serial efforts to gut government agencies and slash the federal work force.

Many of these proposals have landed at the feet of Judge Cooper and his fellow jurists in Federal District Court in Washington who have spent the past four years dealing with an exhausting caseload emerging from efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Now, these same judges are grappling with how to handle a different sort of power grab by Mr. Trump, sometimes halting his blizzard of executive actions and sometimes letting them move forward.

“These mixed results should surprise no one,” Judge Cooper said, in what almost seemed to be a tone of somber resignation. “Federal district judges are duty-bound to decide legal issues based on evenhanded application of law and precedent — no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people.”

This frank confession came as he and the 23 other federal judges in Washington have faced a tsunami of emergency petitions in the past few weeks, arising from a complex constellation of concerns and leading to a series of hastily called hearings.