LAWFARE: Web of Leftist Groups Working in Tandem to Tie Up Trump Agenda in Court

Lawfare hasn’t stopped since Donald Trump became president again, but has been repackaged into civil litigation to stop his second term agenda—and most of the civil lawfare can be traced to groups affiliated with a coalition known as Civil Service Strong.  

Members of the coalition scored federal court wins in recent days to temporarily block Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, to delay a federal employee buyout, and to halt the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The member groups have also been involved in numerous other lawsuits against the Trump administration, including challenging the Schedule F executive order on civil service protections; a suit to block the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative from accessing information; and a lawsuit to prevent disclosure of FBI information. 

“The Left is very good at collaborating. Since the election happened, these organizations have been planning which policies to sue over,” Parker Thayer, investigative researcher with the Capital Research Center, a think tank that monitors nonprofits, told The Daily Signal. “They have been in the lab for a while trying to prepare.”

Civil Service Strong is a project of Democracy Forward, where leading Democrat lawyer Marc Elias is chairman of the board. Elias has been known primarily for election-related litigation and for his role in initiating the discredited Russia collusion investigation during President Donald Trump’s first term. 

Democracy Forward, in a post on X, boasted of filing nine lawsuits against the Trump administration and winning four court orders. 

The groups joining Democracy Forward in Civil Service Strong are two federal unions (the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Federation of Federal Employees); two nonfederal unions (the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, and the American Federation of Teachers); three political lawfare groups (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sued to block Trump from being on the 2024 ballot; the State Democracy Defenders Fund; and Protect Democracy), and two whistleblower-protection groups (the Government Accountability Project and the Project on Government Oversight). 

The managing director of Civil Service Strong is Rob Shriver, appointed as acting director of the Office of Personnel Management under then-President Joe Biden. 

The Daily Signal reached out to each of these organization for this article, but none responded as of publication time.

The Civil Service Strong website identifies “some of the organizations,” and lists 10 groups, which suggests other, unidentified organizations or individuals are part of the coalition.

“I don’t expect the Left’s litigation machine to slow down at all,” the Capital Research Center’s Thayer said. “In Trump’s second term, they are taking him more serious. It’s less about show impeachments and media hoaxes, and more about stopping him in court.” 

On Wednesday, in federal district court in Maryland, Democracy Forward is arguing on behalf of clients suing to prevent Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from entering houses of worship in pursuit of illegal aliens being harbored there.

On Monday, a federal district court in Massachusetts sided with the AFGE and AFSCME, both listed as coalition members, as well as the National Association of Government Employees to pause the Trump administration’s buyout offer to federal employees. Democracy Forward represented the unions in the lawsuit. 

Under the proposed buyout, the Office of Personnel Management offered to pay federal employees through Sept. 30 and provide them with full benefits if they agreed to take the buyout by Feb. 6. A judge already delayed the deadline until Monday, making that the second interim ruling until making a determination on the legality of the buyout offer.

Separately, Democracy Forward and the Public Citizen Litigation Group represented the AFGE and the American Foreign Service Association in a ruling Friday to temporarily halt closing USAID. 

Federal unions are funded through employees’ mandatory dues. 

Lawfare nonprofits groups are funded through private donors. Among the biggest contributors to Democracy Forward was the Sandler Foundation, which provided $2.5 million, according to the most recently available financial information.

The Sandler Foundation has been a longtime donor to organization such as the liberal Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, and ProPublica. The Susan Thomas Buffett Foundation gave $2.14 million to Democracy Forward in 2023. It was established in 1964 by investor Warren Buffett and named after his late first wife. 

On Monday, Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit in a federal district court in Virginia to stop DOGE from accessing government data. A similar lawsuit was filed by another group in the Civil Service Strong coalition, Protect Democracy, which made a complaint the same day in federal court in Maryland against DOGE. 

In a separate lawsuit, Protect Democracy sued on behalf of the Government Accountability Project—also part of the Civil Service Strong coalition—as well as the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association to stop Trump’s executive order to recategorize thousands of career employees to be political employees, which would mean no more civil service protections. 

Protect Democracy was founded in 2017 by Ian Bassin, a former associate White House counsel in the Obama administration. 

In 2023, one of the biggest donors was the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a left-of-center grant maker, which contributed $3 million to Protect Democracy. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation has donated to other liberal organizations, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Brennan Center for Justice. 

Another coalition member, the State Democracy Defenders Fund, scored its own win Monday, teaming with other organizations in a lawsuit in a New Hampshire federal court to block Trump’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants born in the U.S. 

On Friday, a federal judge in the District of Columbia sided with States Defending Democracy Fund to block the Justice Department from releasing the names of FBI personnel involved in the investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol protest. 

On Feb. 3, the State Democracy Defenders Fund joined the Public Citizen Litigation Group to represent the AFGE, the Alliance for Retired Americans, and the Service Employees International Union in a lawsuit to prevent the Department of the Treasury from sharing confidential data with DOGE staff investigating government waste.

The State Democracy Defenders Fund was founded in 2024 by former Obama White House ethics czar Norm Eisen, who Obama later named as U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic. An author of at least three anti-Trump books, Eisen was also a former special counsel in 2019 to the House Judiciary Committee for the first impeachment of Trump. 

In a recent MSNBC interview, Eisen called Trump an “autocrat” and asserted “the lawsuits we’re bringing, I’m planning 100 this year.”

Eisen was also a founding member in the early 2000s of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which is also a member of the coalition. 

For its part, CREW—part of multiple lawsuits against the first Trump administration—is representing the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, in a lawsuit challenging the Trump executive order on “Schedule F,” which recategorized thousands of federal employees from civil service to political appointees. That’s applicable to employees who have a role in implementing policy.

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