The fact that no one can agree on what a lawsuit is anymore is what makes the figure slippery. A single policy, such as the administration’s attempt to abolish birthright citizenship, led to parallel lawsuits brought by various plaintiffs in Seattle, Maryland, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, each of which resulted in a different decision.

Do you consider those to be four cases or one? Prior to the government’s covert reversal of its abrupt termination of F-1 student visa registrations last spring, Politico discovered over a hundred separate filings and fifty restraining orders. The majority of trackers condense that entire episode into a single line. In other words, it’s possible that there are actually far more than a thousand distinct legal actions.

Before the inaugural lunch was cleared on Inauguration Day, the first lawsuit was filed. The Department of Government Efficiency, the Musk-run organization that would control a large portion of 2025, should be categorized as a federal advisory board and subject to transparency regulations, according to a public interest group called National Security Counselors.

The buyout lawsuits, the USAID shutdown lawsuit, the Treasury access lawsuit, the transgender prisoner lawsuit, and the DOGE at the Labor Department lawsuit all surfaced during the ensuing weeks. The administration was disobeying or ignoring court orders in about one-third of cases by mid-July, according to the Washington Post. Legal experts described this as unprecedented and, in some more private discussions, frightening.

If you read enough of the dockets, you will notice the pattern. A Friday is when a policy is delivered. A state attorney general filed by Monday. A nonprofit coalition filed a parallel lawsuit in a more hospitable district by Wednesday. By Tuesday of the following week, the government has filed an appeal after a judge issued a temporary restraining order.

The original policy is either completely destroyed, reinstated, or left in a peculiar half-alive state that no one can adequately explain to the public after the appeals court rules and the Supreme Court rules on a shadow-docket emergency motion. By restricting universal injunctions, Trump v. CASA, which was decided in June of last year, attempted to slow this down by making it more difficult for judges to freeze a policy nationwide. The administration benefited somewhat from it. The filings continued to arrive.

Depending on one’s political stance, 650 could be interpreted as a sign of either obstruction or overreach. It’s most likely neither in the sense that people intend, and it’s most likely both. The speed at which executive action now surpasses the rest of the constitutional machinery is what the figure actually indicates. That is not how quickly Congress is drafting legislation. Cases cannot be heard by the Supreme Court at that rate. State legislatures are undoubtedly unable to keep up.

Because nothing else can proceed quickly enough, the district courts have essentially taken over as the nation’s primary venue for deciding what the government is actually permitted to do. It’s difficult to ignore how worn out the judges sound when you watch it happen. Some of them have begun to express this directly.

No one knows where this ends up. Settlements will be reached in some of these cases. Others will render historic decisions that outlive the people debating them. The 6-3 conservative Supreme Court, which has frequently sided with the administration to reassure its supporters and frequently rejected it to unnerve them, continues to be the court that matters most. After fifteen months, the only thing that appears certain is that the number will continue to rise.

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