In the past several months, the U.S. Supreme Court has delivered mixed responses to President Donald Trump’s agenda items — those that have reached the court, anyway. In a miscellaneous order handed down Tuesday, the Supreme Court granted a stay of a lower court’s injunction barring the Trump administration from implementing a policy which would have kept transgender-identifying individuals from joining the military. The Supreme Court offered no reasoning for its order, but Democrat-appointed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that they would not have granted the stay.

In late February, the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that stringent military fitness standards disqualify those who identify as transgender from serving in the armed forces. “The medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service,” a Department of Defense (DOD) memo read. The memo noted, “The Department only recognizes two sexes: male and female. An individual’s sex is immutable, unchanging during a person’s life. All Service members will only serve in accordance with their sex.”

Some controversy erupted over the DOD policy, with foreign-born, LGBT-identifying, Biden-appointed Judge Ana Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issuing a wordy preliminary injunction in March. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, however, issued an administrative stay, halting Reyes’s own order to halt. But a federal judge in the state of Washington was quick to issue his own nationwide preliminary injunction blocking the DOD policy from going into effect. Perhaps unaware that his D.C. colleague’s order had been struck down, Judge Benjamin Settle of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington openly quoted from Reyes’s order.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit subsequently disagreed with its D.C. counterpart, allowing Settle’s injunction to stand and explaining that Trump administration officials “have not demonstrated that they will suffer irreparable harm absent a stay.” The Trump administration quickly appealed the denial of a stay, asking the Supreme Court to intervene. “In this case, the district court issued a universal injunction usurping the Executive Branch’s authority to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces,” wrote U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer. The Trump administration observed in its petition that the Supreme Court previously stayed similar injunctions against similar policies during the president’s first term.

“It is undisputed that gender dysphoria is a medical condition associated with clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning,” Sauer argued. He continued, “And in the 2025 policy, as in the [2018] policy before it, the Department rationally determined that service by individuals with gender dysphoria would undermine military effectiveness and lethality — consistent with similar, longstanding determinations for a wide range of other medical conditions (such as asthma and hypertension).”

The Supreme Court’s Tuesday order stays Settle’s order, allowing the DOD policy to go into effect. In early April, the Supreme Court seemingly handed the Trump administration a number of significant legal victories, including vacating a district court order preventing the president from carrying out the deportation of Venezuelan nationals affiliated with the foreign terrorist organization Tren de Aragua (TdA) under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act. However, the Supreme Court was excoriated by one of its own justices, Samuel Alito, just a few weeks later for issuing a late-night order halting those same deportations. Alito argued that the Supreme Court lacked jurisdiction, had no reason to issue an emergency order, did not seek an argument from the Trump administration, and did not allow lower courts to develop a record of fact.