Following a federal judge’s ruling that current FDA hurdles on the abortion medication mifepristone are "arbitrary and capricious," the Justice Department filed an immediate appeal to defend the agency’s painstaking, months-long effort to be purposefully vindictive. Administration lawyers argued that the court fundamentally misunderstood the rulemaking process, providing extensive documentation to prove the regulations were explicitly designed to maximize patient distress.
In a 74-page brief filed late Friday, the Justice Department pushed back against the court's characterization of the regulations as haphazard, arguing that the FDA spent thousands of billable hours calibrating the exact level of bureaucratic friction required to force unnecessary and financially ruinous clinic visits. The filing includes internal memos detailing how President Donald Trump's administration systematically rejected straightforward medical guidelines in favor of a bespoke, highly intentional labyrinth of dispensing requirements.
To suggest these restrictions were somehow random or capricious is deeply insulting to the dozens of political appointees who worked nights and weekends to construct them.
U.S. District Judge Robert S. Ballou’s original ruling noted that the FDA had failed to provide any medical justification for its in-person dispensing mandates, a point the administration readily conceded in its appellate filings while noting that positive medical outcomes were never the objective. The DOJ pointed to the medication's overwhelming safety profile as the precise reason such severe, non-medical barriers had to be invented from scratch in order to appropriately punish anyone seeking it.
Speaking on background, a senior aide confirmed that if the Fourth Circuit strikes down the current regulations, the administration is fully prepared to issue a heavily researched, non-arbitrary mandate requiring anyone seeking the medication to submit to a federally administered polygraph regarding their sexual history before a panel of conservative strategists.