Lawsuit by Trump aide seeks to declare the judiciary is part of the executive

07 May, 2025

Despite court rulings to the contrary, a legal foundation led by Trump's aide Stephen Miller is arguing that two offices within the judicial branch are actually executive agencies and should be controlled by the President. America First Legal Foundation filed a lawsuit on April 22nd against two offices that support the federal courts: the Judicial Conference of the United States and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.

First, a little history on these two bodies. The federal court system in the United States is massive and so to manage that system and ensure due process (something else Trump has targeted), Congress created the “Conference of Senior Circuit Judges” in 1922, later renamed to the Judicial Conference (JC).¹ This body served as an official way for federal judges to meet, confer on the administrative challenges of carrying out their day-to-day duties, and then communicate any needs to Congress.

In 1939, Congress created the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) which is directly supervised by the JC. The JC now sits as the policy making body of the federal court system and the AO carries out those policies while also providing general support to the federal court system.² Importantly, all of these functions exist and indeed, necessarily happen without any executive influence. The JC, by law, is made up of federal judges with the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court as the head. The director and deputy director of the AO are both appointed by the Chief Justice. All of this happens without the influence of the executive except for the fact that all federal judges are nominated by said executive branch.

Another important bit of background information deals with the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). FOIA requests serve as a way to make government functions and decisions more transparent, but FOIA requests have a long history of taking years or potential litigation to only possibly see the documents requested. However, and most importantly to the issue at hand, FOIA only applies to executive agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, CIA, etc.

There is a specific exemption for the “courts of the United States.”³ Miller's team is trying to argue that because the JC and AO do not "preside over cases and controversies" as regular courts do, they must not be courts themselves and therefore fall under the executive branch. This thinking twists the truth and case law to fit a very specific and wrong worldview.

Nowhere in Miller’s complaint does it talk about an important case that almost seems to completely shut this case down from the start. From 2004 to 2006, Frederick Banks submitted FOIA requests to at least the United States Probation Office and the AO, which the Probation Office is a part of. The AO denied the requests stating they were not covered by FOIA as they were not an executive agency. When challenged in court, the District Court judge (the lowest level of federal court) found that “the phrase ‘courts of the United States’ ... applies to the entire judicial branch of government.”⁴

As such, the AO and the Probation Office were covered by this exemption and the court specifically found this despite the fact that that offices were not courts themselves. This ruling has been upheld many times over the years by federal courts all over the United States, including in 2023 by the very conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.⁵

However, Miller’s team is arguing that both the AO and the JC are not courts and are, somehow, executive agencies. The case law on the JC is a bit more sparse, but a 1982 decision from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found that the JC also fell under the FOIA exemption for “courts” as the law was written to exempt the entire judicial branch, which the JC is a part of.⁶

This decision has also been upheld throughout the years with other courts using it as a basis for a new test. “To determine whether a body is acting as a 'court,' the analysis looks to how the body in question functions.”⁷ Because the JC performs functions that a court normally would without it, it becomes “integrated” with the courts and therefore falls under the exemption for “courts of the United States.”

With the history and case law explained, I’ll turn back to Miller’s lawsuit. The lawsuit claims outright that the JC is not a court as it applies to FOIA. The argument states that because the Conference has answered questions from Congress, it is “an administrative body”. The fact that the JC is an administrative body is true enough, but as the case law shows, because the JC performs functions that are part of the court system it is an integral part of it. The argument that the JC is not a court directly contradicts many court holdings and should fail on this part alone.

The lawsuit also goes into other claims about the structure of the JC, including the fact that because the Chief Justice is nominated to said position by the President, the JC must be an executive agency. The term used by Miller is that the “Presiding Officer … is required to be presidentially appointed.” While it is true the Chief Justice is nominated by the president, it is required by law that the Chief Justice also serve as the presiding officer of the JC.

Congress created the JC and stipulated that the Chief Justice serve as its presiding officer. Nowhere does the law say that the presiding officer of the JC is to be "presidentially appointed." This is slippery language that the court and the defense should be able to pick up on relatively easily, but it bears mentioning that they are twisting these words around to mean something it doesn’t.

The AO is similarly attacked in the lawsuit with the claim that it does not engage in anything a typical court does. The lawsuit claims, correctly, that the AO has no judicial power but then incorrectly assumes this means that the AO is an independent agency not covered under the “courts” FOIA exemption.

The lawsuit also claims that because the AO complied with requests from Congress for documents they cannot be considered a “court” otherwise Congress could go around demanding information from courts. This claim has little merit as the AO would be well within their rights to deny sharing the information and Congress could challenge that in court. To say that the AO is not a court simply because they complied with a request is far-fetched.

The last thing I want to note is that the lawsuit claims that the director and deputy director of the AO are officers of an executive agency because the law declares them so. The lawsuit points out that the law establishing the AO references Title 5 of the U.S. Code in deeming the director and deputy director “officers.” Again, the lawsuit twists the words of the law.

The very law they cite and quote in their lawsuit allows for officers to be appointed by “a court, [or] the head of an executive agency.”⁸ The argument here is that since the JC is not a court, how can it appoint officers under this definition if it is not an executive agency. The twist is that the lawsuit doesn’t want the judge to see the JC as a “court” and therefore declare both the JC and the AO executive agencies.

I hope I’ve explained the implications of this lawsuit well, but let me summarize. Two bodies, the Judicial Conference (JC) and the Administrative Office (AO) that work entirely to support the judicial branch, are being sued by Stephen Miller’s legal foundation to make them comply with FOIA. FOIA very specifically only applies to the executive branch and its many agencies like the DOJ, FBI, etc.

FOIA has a specific exemption for the “courts of the United States” that has been held in courts over multiple decades to include the JC and the AO. Courts have ruled this way because of how the JC and AO function. They are limited bodies in that they only work within the federal judicial system and they perform duties the courts would otherwise have to do themselves.

With a win in this case by Stephen Miller's group (which, in my admittedly non-lawyer opinion, is not likely), the entire federal judiciary’s day-to-day and administrative functions would suddenly be controlled by the executive branch. The President would be able to set rules, fees, and turn the federal judiciary into Trump’s personal courts.

It is a consolidation of power that goes against the most basic principles of the separation of powers. Stephen Miller is a strong advocate of the “unitary executive theory” which I find to be silly at best and authoritarian at worst and this case is an example of how proponents of that theory see the federal government. Anything the President touches must be overseen by them and anything they says goes.

The surface level argument of this lawsuit is innocent enough, that a group wants access to documents they believe might uncover wrongdoing, but the deeper goal of it is readily apparent the more you read and understand the implications.

Endnotes