The ruling cleared the path without leaving immediate casualties, and that was precisely what made it so unnerving. By lifting the injunction, the Court told challengers they would have to wait until the cuts were real, the pink slips printed, the offices dark. Speculation, they ruled, was not enough to stand in the way of a sitting president’s design for the federal machine.

Jackson’s dissent read like a warning flare over Washington’s skyline: behind the legal language, she saw a slow-motion demolition, agency by agency, job by job. But the majority’s logic handed presidents a sharper tool and a broader canvas. For Trump’s allies, it was a green light to redraw government and money flows at once; for his critics, it was the moment they realized the real battle hadn’t even started.