President Donald Trump told panicked Democrats he has no plans to disregard recent court rulings prohibiting Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from scrutinizing government bureaucracies.
“I always abide by the courts, and then I’ll have to appeal it,” Trump said on Tuesday.
However, he expressed concerns about aspects of the legal process.
“But then, what [Judge Paul Engelmayer has] done is he slowed down the momentum, and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books. You know, if a person’s crooked and they get caught, other people see that, and all of a sudden, it becomes harder later on,” the president said. Engelmayer is the judge overseeing the case against DOGE’s access to Treasury Department data.
When Vice President JD Vance criticized the courts over the weekend for ruling against Musk’s effort to investigate the Department of Treasury, Democrats voiced outrage at the supposition that the Trump administration wants to overthrow the courts in total disregard for democracy.
“The president of the United States cannot seize control of spending, nor can he eliminate departments,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) said. “With every day, there comes a new challenge to the Constitution.”
While Trump reiterated he would always abide by the courts, he expressed concern that decisions undermining DOGE’s authority would allow bureaucracies to get away with kickbacks and other forms of corruption.
“But appeals take a long time, and I would hope that a judge, if you go to a judge and you show them, ‘Here’s a corrupt situation. We have a check to be sent, but we found it to be corrupt. Do you want us to send this corrupt check to a person, or do you want us not to give it and give it back to the taxpayer?’ I would hope a judge would say, ‘Don’t send it. Give it back to the taxpayer,’” Trump continued.
The debate over whether judges should allow the Trump administration certain authorities escalated on Sunday in response to a social media post from Vance.
“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,” the vice president said in a post to X.
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he concluded.
Democrats swiftly targeted Vance over his comments, with Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) saying, “JD, we both went to law school. But we don’t have to be lawyers to know that ignoring court decisions we don’t like puts us on a dangerous path to lawlessness.”
This isn’t the first time critics have accused Trump of trying to defy the courts. During the president’s New York hush money case, Judge Juan Merchan condemned him for violating the court’s gag order, which prohibited him from discussing components of the case. After Merchan said Trump had violated the order 10 times in May 2024, he threatened to send him to jail in lieu of another violation.
Other fierce opponents of the Trump administration, including former Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, accused Vance of advancing tyranny.
“You don’t get to rage-quit the Republic just because you are losing,” the former congresswoman said.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor appeared to weigh in on the controversy on Tuesday.
“Court decisions stand, whether one particular person chooses to abide by them or not,” Sotomayor said during an event at Miami Dade College in Florida. “It doesn’t change the foundation that it’s still a court order that someone will respect at some point.”
During an interview with Politico last year, Vance expanded on his position, saying that in some cases, a judge overruling a president could represent a “constitutional crisis.”
“If the elected president says, ‘I get to control the staff of my own government,’ and the Supreme Court steps in and says, ‘You’re not allowed to do that’ — like, that is the constitutional crisis. It’s not whatever Trump or whoever else does in response. When the Supreme Court tells the president he can’t control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what’s actually going on,” Vance said.
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Trump echoed Vance’s rhetoric during his Oval Office press conference, saying he couldn’t imagine why his efforts to investigate the Treasury Department and other federal agencies for corruption would be held up by the courts.
“Any court that would say that the president or his representatives, like secretary of the treasury, secretary of state, whatever, doesn’t have the right to go over their books and make sure everything’s honest — I mean, how can you have a country? You can’t have anything that way. You can’t have a business that way,” he said. “I hope that the court system is going to allow us to do what we have to do. We got elected to, among other things, find all of this fraud, abuse, all of this, this horrible stuff going on. And we’ve already found billions of dollars. … And when you get down to it, it’s going to be probably close to a trillion dollars.”