By Sucheta Roy
US President Donald Trump on 6th of March signed an executive order which aims at directing the government lawyers on potentially imposing expensive costs on those parties that seeks to obstruct his policies in court.
The order instructed that now the US justice department lawyers must ask the judges to require plaintiffs to cover the cost and damage of the government if it is forced to keep the implementing policy.
Judges are not compelled to grant the requests, but if they do so, then plaintiffs will be forced to give a huge amount of money in order to proceed further with the case.
While accusing “activist organizations” of obtaining improper and overbroad directives, Trump has said in the executive order that, “Federal courts now should hold back the litigants responsible for their misleading and ill-granted directives”.
The move comes from a wave of more than 100 lawsuits registered against
Trump’s efforts to minimise the federal bureaucracy, cut the spending of the government and reshape the country’s immigration and social policies.
In the process Trump has also faced setbacks in the cases but also secured some wins in the recent week.
Recently government lawyers have already started to ask for bonds in several cases, and one lawyer has already turned them down on Trump’s freeze on $3 trillion in federal loans, grants and financial assistance. But, the U.S. District judge Loren Ali Khan has rejected the request, by saying that, “defy logic” to “hold plaintiffs hostage” with a bond. She has blocked the freeze temporarily while she reviews the case.
Additionally, other bond requests have been put in lawsuits against cuts to medical research grants and the funding of the freeze, the judges are yet to have rule on them.