Law school groups are sounding the alarm over the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine the judicial branch, Bloomberg Law reported. 

“There can be no disagreement that in a nation under law, that all government officials, without exception, must comply with direct judicial orders,” the Association of American Law Schools, which represents 175 law schools, said in a statement. “To do otherwise is to shatter our historic system of separation of powers and remove the checks and balances the framers so wisely wrote in our Constitution.”

Since taking office one month ago, President Donald Trump has bypassed congressional approval and used executive orders to enact funding freezes, budget cuts and ideological directives at numerous federal agencies. Some of those actions, including an order to cut more than $4 billion in funding for the National Institutes of Health, have been met with lawsuits and resulted in federal judges issuing injunctions.

On Feb. 9, Vice President J.D. Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, posted on X, the social media site owned by billionaire Elon Musk—whom Trump brought in to cut trillions from the federal budget—that “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

The AALS statement references “recent statements by elected officials and administration representatives that put into question courts’ authority to review the legality of executive action” and says that “defiance of court orders by our government is incompatible with our constitutional democracy.” It also implores Congress and the judiciary to “take all appropriate actions to uphold the rule of law and protect the authority of the judicial branch and the Constitution.”

The American Bar Association, which includes the accrediting body for most law schools, has also spoken out against Trump’s suggestion that the president has the authority to ignore court orders.

“It’s a fundamental cornerstone of our democracy that the courts are the protectors of the citizenry from government overreach,” the group said on Feb. 10.

Days later, Andrew Ferguson, the new Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission, banned political appointees in the FTC from holding leadership roles in the ABA, participating in or attending ABA events, or renewing their ABA memberships. In a letter announcing the change, Ferguson cited the ABA’s “long history of leftist advocacy and its recent attacks on the Trump-Vance Administration’s governing agenda” that “have made this relationship untenable.”