Most of the executive branch of the US government is entirely a creation of Congress. Similarly, the lower federal courts are entirely creations of Congress. The federal courts police whether executive branch agencies have acted legally or illegally by interpreting statutes to assess the limits of agencies’ legislatively delegated statutory authority. However, the Trump administration’s relationship with lower federal courts has been more adversarial than any administration in recent history. In many recent cases, federal district and appellate courts have preliminarily found the executive branch to have acted beyond its authority, only to have the Supreme Court overturn the relief that those courts have granted. This is perhaps best illustrated by the recent lower court and Supreme Court decisions in McMahon v. New York, where various plaintiffs challenged the Trump administration’s firing of almost half of the Department of Education (DOE) staff and the transfer of many DOE functions to other federal agencies.    To the extent that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority is implicitly announcing previously unknown legal principles, staying lower court decisions without articulating the Court’s rationale is certainly the worst possible way to do it. And without such implicit changes in longstanding legal principles, the Court’s ruling seems impossible to justify.