Standing doctrine has stymied challenges to other Trump administration actions
The Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling allowing construction to continue on President Trump’s White House ballroom crystallized a recurring obstacle for his legal challengers: not whether they have winning arguments, but whether they can find plaintiffs with standing to sue.
The majority declined to address whether Trump had legal authority for the project without congressional approval. Instead, the court held the lawsuit improper because a preservation group could not credibly allege it faced the kind of real and specific harms that confer legal standing. A member of the group who has conducted walking tours and written scholarly articles on Washington’s historic architecture had not suffered an actual legal injury from a ballroom going up where the White House East Wing once stood, the court said.
“Mere offense, disagreement, or distaste does not qualify as a concrete and particularized injury,” the majority wrote.
It is not yet clear whether lawyers challenging the ballroom can find other plaintiffs who would meet the court’s standing test. Construction on the project is already more than half completed.
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented, noting that the Supreme Court has previously allowed environmental litigants to claim injury from the extinction of an animal species they would like to observe in the wild. Roberts said a preservationist ought to be able to claim a similar legal interest “in physically viewing, appreciating, and studying a historic building as it is.”
The ballroom case illustrates a broader pattern. Lawyers have struggled in multiple high-profile challenges to Trump administration actions to identify plaintiffs with cognizable legal harm.
After the Justice Department announced a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate Trump allies who said they had been targeted unfairly by the government, attorneys scrambled to find suitable challengers. One lawsuit relied on a coalition that included a fired prosecutor who had worked on Jan. 6 cases and a professor arrested for protesting immigration enforcement. The plaintiffs said they were victims of political targeting in the Trump era and would not be treated by a Trump-backed fund as equally worthy. A judge said that theory was likely sufficient to proceed, but the Justice Department abandoned the fund under political pressure before the question was definitively resolved.
A separate provision ending pending IRS audits of Trump, his family and his businesses remains in effect. Court watchers said it is unclear whether anyone has standing to challenge it.
In a Supreme Court immigration case last year, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said Latinos challenging Trump administration enforcement raids in Los Angeles likely lacked standing because they had no firm basis for knowing that they would be stopped for immigration questioning based on their race, accent or occupation.
The Justice Department is currently arguing that a group of noncitizen women cannot claim harm from Trump’s executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship because they have already given birth. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman rejected that argument Wednesday in a federal court in Maryland. “Nowhere in the order does it indicate it does not apply to children already born,” Boardman wrote.
In some cases, no serious lawsuit materialized at all. None emerged when the Trump administration accepted a $400 million luxury jet from the Qatari government, or when it rebranded the Department of Defense as the Department of War.
Alan Morrison, who teaches civil procedure and constitutional law at George Washington University, said the doctrine of standing is unpredictable. “The court finds standing when it wants to find standing,” Morrison said.
Tara Leigh Grove, a law professor at the University of Texas, said persistence by litigants and lawyers can produce unexpected outcomes. When President Joe Biden in 2022 announced a broad package to wipe out student-loan debt for millions of borrowers, Grove said she initially thought no one would have standing. A group of Republican-led states ultimately convinced the Supreme Court’s conservative majority that Missouri had standing because a loan-servicing entity it created would lose revenue if the debt was forgiven. “One should never underestimate the creativity and persistence of our legal community,” Grove said.
In other high-profile cases, justices have agreed across ideological lines that challengers’ claims of harm were insufficient. In 2024, the high court unanimously rejected a bid by antiabortion doctors and medical associations to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone because they did not prescribe or use the drug. “A plaintiff’s desire to make a drug less available for others does not establish standing to sue,” Kavanaugh wrote for the court.