“Sue the bastards” may be the most effective act of resistance in America right now — and one organization leading the charge to rein in the executive branch is headquartered close to the White House.
Since President Donald Trump’s return to power, the national nonprofit Democracy Forward has filed hundreds of legal actions and kicked off more than 150 investigations to contest unconstitutional acts, protect civil service employees and safeguard public programs under threat by the Trump-Vance administration.
Now led by Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward was launched in 2017 during the early months of Trump’s first presidency. Today, the legal action and public policy group has a staff of around 130, more than half of whom are lawyers. It has also partnered with more than 650 organizations intent on defending democracy in the United States. Democracy Forward operates along two tracks, the 501c3 Democracy Forward Foundation and the 501c4 Democracy Forward, both of which have Perryman as president and CEO.
A founding member of Democracy Forward’s litigation team, Perryman returned to the organization and took the helm a few months after January 6, 2021. Perryman previously served as chief legal officer and general counsel of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, where she has said she witnessed the harm extremism had wrought in states across the country in the reproductive care space.
The 501c3 foundation’s donors include individuals (small and high dollar), grantor institutions and foundations. The Sandler Foundation gifted the group $16 million between 2018 and 2023, and the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation gave around $4 million between 2021 and 2023. More recently, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation gave $2.5 million between 2024 and 2025, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gifted more than $6.25 million, also during those two years, according to the foundations’ websites.
Since 2021, the organization has significantly ratcheted up its budget every year. The work is difficult and labor intensive, said Perryman, and Trump 2.0 called for scaling and staffing (including hiring former federal agency attorneys) to meet need, show strength and create a court-based counterattack rooted in disruptive volume. In Democracy Forward’s recently ended fiscal year, its budget was around $50 million; the organization wants to double that figure for the fiscal year ahead. “You cannot fight autocracy by the spoonful,“ Perryman told IP.
Ten months into this presidential term, the organization shows no sign of letting up on its efforts to challenge, resist or otherwise “make good trouble” when it comes to challenging Trump’s authoritarian playbook. “Since Inauguration Day, Democracy Forward has gone to court every day on behalf of people of all ideologies and identities,” Perryman told Congress in June. “That’s because since Inauguration Day, the president and his administration have acted beyond the lawful bounds of executive authority, usurping the power of Congress, seeking to eliminate due process of law, ignoring court orders and targeting vulnerable people and organizations.”
Perryman, the product of a Texas public school education, calls it as she sees it. And what she sees: The current occupants of the White House are doing all they can to dismantle American democratic values, policies and laws. “These anti-democratic and authoritarian actions present overall threats to our nation’s democracy as well as to the safety and security of people living in America,” she said at the June congressional hearing. “Right now, the American people are in danger and our democracy is in crisis.”
See you in court: Challenging policies, forming partnerships, protecting people
The organization is beyond busy. It’s on a mission to block actions, buy time and otherwise slow Trump’s roll in his effort to dismantle democracy during his Oval Office do-over.
Since the start of 2025, Democracy Forward’s legal team has filed to: stop the president’s federal funding freezes; block the decimation of the U.S. Department of Education; ensure the right to due process for all Americans; challenge DOGE and Elon Musk’s attempts to access the personal data of individual Americans; protect religious communities and prevent ICE from entering houses of worship to indiscriminately conduct enforcement operations; contest policies that prolong the detention of immigrant children without their families; and dispute the lack of due process afforded clients — including men disappeared through an unlawful agreement between the government of El Salvador and the U.S. Department of State.
Democracy Forward has garnered kudos for its deftness at tackling Trump in court, whether challenging executive orders, statutes or regulations. Political reporter Michael Scherer of The Atlantic recently dubbed Democracy Forward “the single largest source of Trump’s legal troubles,” a moniker the group quickly touted. And Perryman has been singled out for her leadership. She was named one of 2025’s Time 100, the magazine’s annual list of influential people, as well as one of this year’s 500 Most Influential People Shaping Policy by Washingtonian magazine and one of The NonProfit Times’ Power & Influence Top 50.
The organization’s adept use of the judicial branch is the result of a two-year effort by its litigation crew, who crafted potential legal strategies for combating federal policy plans detailed in Project 2025 in the lead-up to the 2024 election. The 900-page political playbook the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation compiled in preparation for Trump’s return to power gave the lawyers at Democracy Forward plenty to work with. They also coordinated with hundreds of civil society groups and state attorneys general to determine when to collaborate to defend the rule of law.
Their legal offensive has met with some success. Of the 437 cases filed through October 8 against the Trump administration, 141 have led to orders blocking at least part of the president’s efforts, and 193 cases await a ruling, according to a tally by Just Security, a litigation tracker that lists challenges to Trump’s administrative actions. Dozens of those rulings are the last word — meaning there is no avenue for appeal by the government — while others have been stayed on appeal, including by the conservative majority Supreme Court, as Scherer has noted.
Democracy Forward initiated many of the filings, working to find plaintiffs they could represent pro bono to make their legal arguments and illustrate the harm caused by administration actions. They have relentlessly attempted to block, blunt or otherwise temper Trump’s often mayhem-inducing executive orders, and filed to have other violations of the law and Constitution reversed, delayed or upended. Said Perryman: “Our work demonstrates that the American people are determined to protect their rights, to use lawful and peaceful means of petitioning their government, and, when necessary, to hold their government accountable.”
Democracy Forward recently launched and staffed an appellate practice to increase its capacity to challenge Trump’s administrative actions and to address a gap left by private law firms bowing out of politically sensitive pro bono appellate litigation in the current charged climate.
Of course, there’s still that conservative-led Supreme Court to contend with, which to date has ruled more favorably for the president than district courts. Given that, the legal scorecard could eventually swing in the president’s favor, as the mostly Republican-appointed justices consider legal questions presented by team Trump. And yet…
More than one way to measure success
Perryman pointed out that court victories are only one way of measuring success. The court of public opinion is also at stake. Pollsters tracking Trump’s approval ratings will likely assess the effect the legal efforts have on the 2026 midterm elections; according to an October Reuters/Ipso poll, Trump’s job approval rating stands at 40%, his second-lowest number since taking office. “Despite the bluster from the White House, the president has been losing public support. He is losing in court in ways that he did not anticipate,” Perryman told The Atlantic.
Voters have the power to provide the ultimate check, Perryman told IP, and these court fights are a way of alerting and educating the American public to all the ways the Trump administration is overreaching. “In this new paradigm, success is not one thing,” she said. “Success is not just winning a final court order, although I’m convinced we will in some of our cases. Success in this moment is people being able to demonstrate that in this country, the people are still supreme, and they have the power to stop what is, right now, a runaway and autocratic executive branch.”
Showcasing the enduring power of individuals is among Democracy Forward’s biggest weapons. “The No. 1 tool autocratic actors use is to deprive people of their hope and to try to convince people that they have no tools or power left,” said Perryman. “Our team prioritizes matters that are able to affirm the power of people and use the power that people have, including the ability to initiate litigation against their government, in order to make real change and to create inroads.”
The way Perryman parses it, there are three levers of power for people when a democracy is backsliding: the streets, the ballot and the courts. “We don’t win every fight that we take on. Many days are quite devastating for the people that we have the honor of representing. Holding that truth is challenging,” she told The Cut.
People are being harmed, even terrorized, as a result of Trump’s policies, she told IP, noting that the president has dispatched the military to several cities and threatened certain segments of society with arrest or deportation, essentially driving them underground. It’s relentless and exhausting at every turn. She also told The Cut: “One of the best pieces of advice that I got and repeat all the time is, ‘When you’re tired, it’s important to rest. But do not quit.’”
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Meeting the moment while looking ahead
In November 2024, Democracy Forward and 280 other organizations — including many pro-democracy and human rights nonprofits — launched Democracy 2025, which includes a resource hub that allows the public to keep track of the administration’s actions and how they can respond. The number of litigation, advocacy and policy partners in the coalition has since swelled to more than 650. Democracy funders frequently talk about the need for such collaborations to respond to the current administration. (The group self-describes as nonpartisan. Both the Democracy Forward and Democracy Forward Foundation boards are chaired by attorney Marc Elias, an expert on voting rights and founder of Democracy Docket. Elias served as general counsel for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.)
Democracy Forward has goals beyond current regime challenges. The Democracy Forward Foundation is incubating other projects such as Civil Service Strong, focused on efforts to rebuild and reimagine government, and We Hold These Truths, intended to unite ideologically diverse people behind common principles. “Our organization is called Democracy Forward for a reason. We believe that there is much more to do in this moment than just address the pressing issues,” said Perryman, “this crisis can be a catalyst for real, bold change that people in this country need, and have needed for some time.”
For her part, Perryman said that the current landscape calls for thinking beyond party affiliations. “The vast majority of the American people agree on more than they disagree on, “ she said. “We are now in the midst of a rapidly accelerating autocratic threat that is a new paradigm for this country, even though we have had prior times in our history where we have seen autocratic strategies,” noted Perryman, “whether in the Jim Crow South, whether in the early days of the country, when there was human enslavement and the displacement of Native Americans from their land. But we are now in a place where we are rapidly backsliding. “
The next 200 days are critical, she said. “If you look through history, many people have wondered, what would they have done in the civil rights movement? What would they have done in the abolitionist movement?” she asked. “What would they have done in World War II? We as a generation now get to answer that question, because we are in that moment.”
“We are amidst a massive not only crisis in our democracy, but a crisis in our humanity. There’s no amount of work that you can do to keep people from being harmed by a government that seems so intent on harming people and engaging in cruelty,” Perryman said. “But what we also know about this moment is that we are in it, and the only way out of it is through it, and you have to choose how you are going to get through it.”
