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Elon Musk wants a federal judge to be “fired” after Donald Trump’s administration was ordered to restore public health data that was removed from government websites.
“This evil judge must be fired!” said Musk, sharing a photograph of Washington, D.C. District Judge John Bates on his X platform.
Bates granted a temporary restraining order this week following a lawsuit from a group of physicians and healthcare providers who warned that the abrupt removal of websites and data sets from federal public health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration posed a “serious threat” to public health.
The removal of public health data created a “dangerous gap in the scientific data available to monitor and respond to disease outbreaks, halt or hamper key health research, and deprive physicians of resources that impact clinical practice,” plaintiffs wrote.
On Tuesday, Bates — who was appointed by President George W. Bush — ordered the restoration of those websites and blocked the administration from making changes.
Those pages included information for patients about HIV testing and HIV prevention and datasets showing communities their vulnerabilities to climate disasters, among other information that was culled by Trump under his sweeping executive orders.
“It bears emphasizing who ultimately bears the harm of defendants’ actions: everyday Americans, and most acutely, underprivileged Americans, seeking healthcare,” Bates wrote in his order.
Musk’s latest threat follows a series of daily attacks against members of the judiciary from Musk and other members of the Trump administration, baselessly accusing judges of corruption and politically targeted attacks for blocking the president’s blitzkrieg of actions.
The world’s wealthiest man and his allies have repeated false and inflated claims about how the three branches of government operate, and how a system of checks and balances is designed to prevent the presidency from accumulating supreme authority.
Their comments are raising alarms among constitutional scholars and legal analysts for an impending constitutional crisis — which the White House blames on the judges, not the president’s spurious legal actions and his administration’s baseless insistence that he should not be subject to checks and balances in the courts.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused the “media” of “fear mongering” about an impending crisis.
“The real constitutional crisis is taking place within our judicial branch where district court judges in liberal districts are abusing their power,” she told reporters on Wednesday.
She claimed that the injunctions against the administration — issued in response to an avalanche of lawsuits — have “no basis in the law.”
“We will comply with these orders but it is also the administration’s position that we will ultimately be vindicated,” she said. “This is the continuation of the weaponization of justice against President Trump.”
In response to lawsuits, federal judges have also blocked the administration from unilaterally redefining the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, firing thousands of aid workers, and imposing a deadline for more than 2 million federal workers to accept so-called “buyout” offers, among other actions.
“Federal judges who repeatedly abuse their authority to obstruct the will of the people via their elected representatives should be impeached,” Musk asked in a poll on X.
