In defending President Trump’s April 2025 memorandum directing agencies to rescind regulations they deem to be “facially unlawful,” a recent post in this forum misinterprets the scope of the “good cause” exception to the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).
On May 1, 2025, the Acting Administrator of the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division published a Field Assistance Bulletin stating that, while the Department is reconsidering its 2024 notice-and-comment rule on “Employee or Independent Contractor Classification Under the Fair Labor Standards Act,” the Division “will no longer apply the 2024 Rule’s analysis when determining employee versus independent contractor status in FLSA investigations.” The Bulletin amounts to an effective repeal of the 2024 Rule, issued without reasoned decisionmaking and notice and comment. Litigants therefore might challenge the Bulletin in court.
Here at the Center, we were among the first to sound the alarm on precisely these risks that Project 2025 — and especially its nearly 1,000-page policy blueprint called Mandate for Leadership — posed. That’s why we joined our colleagues at Governing for Impact in setting up a comprehensive tracker for monitoring the Trump administration’s progress in implementing Project 2025’s recommendations for domestic policy executive actions covering 20 different agencies.
The Center for Progressive Reform, which compiled a list of all the executive branch policies proposed in the conservative playbook, found the Trump administration has attempted or completed 153 of the 532 policies tracked as of April 15.
This Issue Brief outlines how litigants might challenge the Trump administration’s potential
non-enforcement efforts. It first explains why two cases often thought to make nonenforcement challenges more difficult—Heckler v. Chaney and United States v. Texas—in
fact leave substantial room to challenge categorical non-enforcement directives. It then
walks through how litigants might frame such challenges, focusing on how litigants might
identify a challengeable action, how they might demonstrate standing, what legal claims
they might assert, and which remedies they might be able to seek. Finally, it identifies how
litigants might challenge other types of decisions related to non-enforcement, including
efforts to delay federal rules, refusals to engage in rulemaking, and failures to take
statutorily required actions.
Will Dobbs-Allsopp, policy director of Governing for Impact, and James Goodwin, policy director at the Center for Progressive Reform, have publicly tracked the executive actions suggested for 20 different agencies in Project 2025 as Trump has carried some of them out. Of the 532 proposals in the project that fall under these actions, Trump has already proposed, attempted or completed 153 of them – about 29%.
At least on domestic policy, the administration has in a short period of time made a remarkable amount of progress on implementing the mandate’s recommendations. Of the more than 530 executive actions across 20 agencies that the document advises, 28 percent have already been undertaken or completed.
“A substantial plurality track very closely with specific recommendations in Project 2025,” Goodwin said, mentioning the executive orders on transgender rights as a particularly striking example. “In some cases, the language is almost lifted verbatim — or, in other cases, where the executive order itself accomplishes something that Project 2025 called for in general.”
Much like the Trump Administration’s attempt to “dismantle and disable the agency entirely,” the administration’s latest effort to prevent CFPB from enforcing vital consumer protections is unlawful.
Even after the Supreme Court’s shadow-docket decision, there remain ways to assert award-termination challenges in district court.