How Courts Are Interpreting CASA and the APA- Universal Vacatur i

1. Introduction 

A critical issue for businesses and organizations that challenge federal agency action is brewing before the Supreme Court. It concerns the scope of relief available under the Administrative Procedure Act (the “APA”) and the longstanding practice of courts reviewing agency rules or regulations to vacate those rules and regulations when violative of the APA. This issue first rose to prominence in November 2022, when U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar argued in United States v. Texas (in contrast to decades of federal court practice) that the APA does not permit a court to “vacate” a regulation of a federal agency. Rather, Solicitor General Prelogar argued that a court may only “set aside” an agency decision if it applies to the specific parties before the court.

At the heart of the current debate is Section 706 of the APA. After a court finds that an agency action violated the APA, Section 706 states that “the reviewing court shall hold unlawful and set aside [the] agency action, findings, and conclusions” that led to the action. Setting aside the agency action, in turn, includes “issu[ing] all necessary and appropriate process to postpone the effective date of an agency action or to preserve status or rights pending conclusion of the review proceedings.” The crux of the Section 706 debate is the meaning of “set aside.” The longstanding view (consistently applied by the D.C. Circuit and other appellate courts) is that “set aside” means to vacate the agency action under review, effectively granting relief to those not parties to the litigation because the challenged action loses legal effect across the board.

Several of the Justices reacted to Solicitor General Prelogar’s argument with surprise. Chief Justice Roberts called the Solicitor General’s position “fairly radical and inconsistent” with “established practice under the APA,” including stating that universal vacatur was “what the D.C. Circuit and other courts of appeals have been doing all the time as a staple of their decision output,” and was a remedy that the Court had upheld “over and over and over again.” However, not all members of the Court shared that view. Justice Gorsuch, in tacit support of the Solicitor General, thought it strange that Congress would include a sweeping new remedy in Section 706 of the APA when, in his view, another section of the APA addresses remedies. Justice Gorsuch has continued to express skepticism that Congress intended to give judges the power to vacate agency action, cautioning that the Supreme Court will eventually have to address the issue.

Meanwhile, Justice Alito made a plea for additional scholarly work in this area, noting that the “innovative” law review article relied on by the government was published only in 2020. The topic of universal vacatur arose again in February 2023 at oral argument in Department of Education v. Brown, a challenge to the Biden Administration’s student loan forgiveness program. However, the Court did not address the propriety of universal relief in either case.

2. How Trump v. CASA, Inc. Changed the Landscape

That changed on June 27, 2025, when the Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA, Inc.limited the ability of federal district courts to issue “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions. Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett held that the Judiciary Act of 1789 did not authorize federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions, siding with the Trump administration’s efforts to undo a nationwide injunction blocking the President’s birthright citizenship executive order.

While United States v. Texas opened the door to questioning decades of precedent that the APA permits a court to “vacate” a regulation of a federal agency, Trump v. CASA, Inc.kicked the door wide open. Though CASA was limited to nationwide injunctions, the decision casts doubt on alternative avenues of relief beyond the parties to a case.

3. Justice Kavanaugh’s Interpretation

Justice Kavanaugh has emerged as a strong proponent of the traditional interpretation of Section 706 that would permit vacatur. In a 2024 concurrence in Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, a case that dealt with a business’s challenge to an agency rule regulating the fees that banks may charge, Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the APA authorizes vacatur of agency rules and called the opposing position “both novel and wrong.” Notably, Justice Kavanaugh observed that if the Court rejected the longstanding vacatur assumption, it would shut the door to many APA cases where an entity challenging a rule is not itself regulated by the rule.

4. Post-CASA Federal Court Decisions

Importantly, CASA declined to resolve “the distinct question whether the [APA] authorizes federal courts to vacate federal agency action.” However, a handful of courts since CASA have grappled with, but ultimately upheld, courts’ vacatur power under the APA. Last December, for example, in a case involving the lawfulness of a drug reimbursement program administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (“HHS”), the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine embraced the broad relief available under the APA notwithstanding CASA’slimitations.

In preliminarily enjoining HHS’s implementation of the program and extending relief to those outside the case, the district court emphasized that CASA “declined to resolve the distinct question whether the [APA] authorizes federal courts to vacate federal agency action.” The Court referenced language from CASA itself, including Justice Kavanaugh’s concurrence acknowledging that district courts may still “grant or deny the functional equivalent of a universal injunction—for example, by . . . preliminarily setting aside or declining to set aside an agency rule under the APA.” Ultimately, though, the American Hospital Association court concluded that CASA does not limit the APA’s traditional remedies and preliminary or permanent vacatur need not be confined to the plaintiffs alone. Rather, the APA empowers federal courts to “hold unlawful and set aside agency action,” which includes the authority to vacate agency rules on a universal basis. 

The American Hospital Association court also cited both Supreme Court and circuit court authority recognizing that this “set aside” power is not restricted to the parties before the court, noting that the First Circuit had already declined to limit APA relief to identified association members. And in National TPS Alliance v. Noem, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit briefly touched on the question in an August 2025 opinion related to the Trump administration’s removal of temporary protected status for Venezuelans and noted that CASA did not address the proper scope of APA relief. 

5. Conclusion

The American Hospital Association and National TPS Alliance decisions confirm that, unless and until the Supreme Court holds otherwise, CASA does not curtail the broad remedial powers available to federal courts under the APA. However, because CASA kicked the door open to further challenges regarding the powers available to district courts under the APA, Justice Gorsuch’s hypothesis that “sooner or later” the Supreme Court will have to resolve the issue of universal vacatur will likely come true in the near future. When that happens, the competing viewpoints of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will be front and center.

1.  See Brief for the Petitioners at 39-44, United States v. Texas, 599 U.S. 670 (No. 22-58). 

4. Mila Sohoni, The Past and Future of Universal Vacatur, 133 Yale L.J. 2305, 2336 (2024).

5. See id. at 2311; Oral Argument Tr. at 55, 75, Texas, 599 U.S. 670 (No. 22-58). 

6. Oral Argument Tr. at 36, Texas, 599 U.S. 670 (No. 22-58) (Chief Justice Roberts exclaimed, “Wow.”).

9. United States v. Texas, 599 U.S. 670, 693 (2023) (Gorsuch, J., concurring) (“[G]iven the volume of litigation under the APA, this Court will have to address them sooner or later.”).

10. Sohoni, supra note 4, at 2309 (citing Oral Argument Tr. at 119, Texas, 599 U.S. 670 (No. 22-58)). The referenced law review article is John Harrison, Section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act Does Not Call for Universal Injunctions or Other Universal Remedies, 37 Yale J. on Regul. Bull. 37, 37 (2020). 

11. Oral Argument Tr. at 15-19, 47-49, Dep’t of Educ. v. Brown, 600 U.S. 551 (2023) (No. 22-535).

12. Sohoni, supra note 4, at 2310.

13. Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831, 861 (2025).

15. See Sohoni, supra note 4, at 2310.

16. CASA, 606 U.S. at 843-44, 861. 

17. Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 603 U.S. 799, 827 (2024) (Kavanaugh, J., concurring).

18. Id. at 836 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring).

19. CASA, 606 U.S. at 861 n.10.

20. American Hospital Association v. Kennedy, 2025 WL 3754193, at *9 (D. Me. Dec. 29, 2025) (citing CASA, 606 U.S. at 873 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring)).

22. Id. (citing CASA, 606 U.S. at 873 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring)).

23. Id. (quoting 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)).

24. Id. (citing Doe v. Trump, 157 F.4th 36, 80 (1st Cir. 2025)).

25. National TPS Alliance v. Noem, 150 F.4^th 1000, 1027-28 (9th Cir. 2025) (citing Immigrant Defs. L. Ctr. v. Noem, 145 F.4th 972, 995 (9th Cir. 2025) (“Under this [complete-relief] principle, the question is not whether an injunction offers complete relief to everyone potentially affected by an allegedly unlawful act; it is whether an injunction will offer complete relief to the plaintiffs before the court.”)).