Federal Judge Dismisses Interfaith Challenge to Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission

Judge John P. Cronan held that the Commission’s membership satisfies the Federal Advisory Committee Act and that its record releases during the case left the plaintiffs with nothing left to win.

A federal judge in Manhattan dismissed the lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission on July 27, 2026. Four advocacy organizations and the Rev. Paul Raushenbush claimed the Commission’s membership violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s fair balance requirement and that the panel had withheld records the statute makes public. Judge John P. Cronan ruled the organizations had standing to sue, then rejected both claims. Judicial review of committee balance is highly deferential and reaches only extreme cases, he wrote, and President Trump alone appointed the members, placing that decision outside the reach of the Administrative Procedure Act. The statute sets no deadline for releasing committee records, and the Commission posted the disputed documents during the litigation. Raushenbush was dismissed for lack of standing. The organizations lost with prejudice. Their motion to block the Commission’s report was denied as moot.

Case Information

Case: The Interfaith Alliance, et al. v. Donald Trump, et al., No. 1:26-cv-01075 (JPC)

Court: U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York

Judge: John P. Cronan

Filed: Feb. 10, 2026 (initial filing Feb. 9, 2026)

Decided: July 27, 2026

Underlying order: Executive Order 14291, 90 Fed. Reg. 19,417 (May 7, 2025)

Judge John P. Cronan dismissed the case in full. His July 27 opinion holds that the Religious Liberty Commission’s thirteen sitting members satisfy the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s fair balance requirement, that President Trump alone chose those members and therefore no agency defendant can be ordered to fix them, and that the Commission’s release of meeting records during the litigation left the transparency claims with nothing to remedy. The four organizations that brought the suit cleared the standing hurdle and lost anyway.

The ruling landed with weeks to spare. The Commission published a draft of its report on June 26, 2026, and closed public comment on July 12 or 13. Plaintiffs had asked the court to enjoin publication of the final report before it reaches the President, arguing that a document produced by an imbalanced panel cannot be unread once policymakers have it. Judge Cronan denied that motion as moot. The opinion is the first extended federal analysis of how the fair balance requirement applies to an advisory body whose assigned subject is religion, and its answer is that courts should mostly stay out of the question.

What did the court decide on July 27?

Judge Cronan granted the government’s motion to dismiss under Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 12(b)(1) and 12(b)(6). The holdings break down this way:

● The four organizational plaintiffs have standing to challenge the Commission’s balance. Their government advocacy is a core activity, and slanted policy recommendations would interfere with it.

● Raushenbush does not have standing on either claim. His claims were dismissed without prejudice for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.

● The Commission is fairly balanced under a deferential standard that reaches only extreme cases.

● Only the President appoints Commission members, so the Administrative Procedure Act claim against the Justice Department fails on causation and redressability.

● The mandamus claim fails for want of a clear and indisputable right to relief.

● The disclosure claims fail on the pleadings. The statute imposes no deadline, and the records are now public.

● The organizational plaintiffs’ claims were dismissed with prejudice. The preliminary injunction motion was denied as moot. The clerk was directed to close the case.

What is the Religious Liberty Commission and who serves on it?

President Trump created the Commission by executive order on May 1, 2025. The order directs the panel to produce a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America, current threats to its exercise, and strategies for its protection, and to advise the White House Faith Office and the Domestic Policy Council. Required subjects include conscience protections in health care and vaccine mandates, parental authority over the upbringing and education of children, and voluntary prayer and religious instruction in public schools.

The order authorizes up to 14 presidential appointees. Thirteen were announced the same day the order issued. Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick serves as chairman and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson as vice chairman. The others named were Bishop Robert Barron, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Pastor Franklin Graham, Pastor Paula White, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, Ryan T. Anderson, Carrie Prejean Boller, Phil McGraw, Eric Metaxas, Kelly Shackelford and Allyson Ho. The members designated three ex officio participants: then-Attorney General Pamela Bondi, HUD Secretary Scott Turner and Domestic Policy Council Director Vince Haley.

Two details from the opinion cut against the picture of a fixed 14-member panel. The fourteenth seat was never filled. Boller has not been part of the Commission since at least March 23, 2026. The Justice Department funds and staffs the body, and DOJ employee Mary Margaret Bush serves as its designated federal officer. The Commission held seven hearings between June 16, 2025, and April 13, 2026. A final meeting has not yet occurred.

What does the Federal Advisory Committee Act actually require?

Congress passed FACA more than fifty years ago as a compromise. Advisory committees were useful sources of outside expertise. They were vulnerable to capture by industry and special interests. Rather than burying them in procedure, Congress imposed light obligations. Three matter here:

● Fair balance. Committee membership must be fairly balanced in terms of the points of view represented and the functions to be performed. 5 U.S.C. Section 1004(b)(2).

● Public records. Records, transcripts, minutes, working papers, drafts, studies and agendas made available to or prepared for a committee must be available for public inspection and copying, subject to the Freedom of Information Act exemptions. 5 U.S.C. Section 1009(b).

● A federal officer. An officer or employee of the federal government must chair or attend each meeting. 5 U.S.C. Section 1009(e).

One structural fact shapes every FACA case. The statute creates no private cause of action. Plaintiffs must borrow one. The Administrative Procedure Act reaches only federal agencies, and the President is not an agency under that act. Against a non-agency defendant, the only vehicle is mandamus, which requires a plainly defined and peremptory duty. That mismatch decided a large part of this case.

Who sued, and what did they allege?

Interfaith Alliance, Muslims for Progressive Values, the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund, and Hindus for Human Rights filed suit in February 2026, joined by the Rev. Paul Raushenbush, Interfaith Alliance’s president and chief executive.

Their fair balance theory had three parts: no member represents a religious tradition outside Christianity and Judaism; every member has expressed the view that religious exercise should prevail over the civil rights of minority groups; and the panel’s views on church and state run in one direction. Their transparency theory listed five failures, among them the absence of advance witness lists and agendas, missing written witness statements, missing detailed minutes, and incomplete transcripts for three 2025 meetings.

Raushenbush added a personal claim. On Dec. 15, 2025, Interfaith Alliance sent a one-page letter to President Trump and Attorney General Bondi asking that he be appointed. No response came. He argued that amounted to a constructive denial and deprived him of fair consideration.

Who had standing, and who did not?

The organizations won this round. Judge Cronan applied the rule that a plaintiff holding a procedural right need not satisfy the ordinary immediacy requirements, then located a concrete interest behind the procedure. Government advocacy on church-state questions is what these groups do. Policy recommendations from an imbalanced commission would make that work harder. The court analogized to Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, where a housing counseling organization was injured by a realtor’s false information about apartment availability. The distinction the court drew is worth marking: the Commission recommends policy, it does not enact it, so the injury runs to advocacy rather than to abstract disagreement with government conduct.

Raushenbush lost on every theory. His interest in religious liberty policy is a special interest, not a personal injury. The diverted resources belong to Interfaith Alliance, and his own declaration said so. The fair consideration theory failed for a subtler reason. Stigmatic injury claims of that kind rest on a rule that prevented the plaintiff from competing on an equal footing, as in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. A fair balance violation involves no discriminatory classification at all. An appointing officer could weigh every application evenhandedly and still assemble a lopsided panel, or play favorites and end up with a balanced one.

The court added a practical point. The December letter arrived more than seven months after the membership was announced and after four public meetings had been held. Whether an application process ever existed is doubtful. If a letter like that conferred standing, any person with a passion for religious issues could manufacture a case by writing one.

Why did the court find the Commission fairly balanced?

The standard did most of the work. Courts reviewing committee balance have been highly deferential for decades, and the Second Circuit has never weighed in on whether the question is reviewable at all. Judge Cronan assumed reviewability for argument’s sake and then applied the extreme-case test articulated in NRDC v. Department of the Interior: a violation appears when an agency announces it will exclude all points of view except one.

On the record before him, the Commission failed that test in every direction. Its members work in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Some are clergy and some are lay congregants. Their backgrounds range from a state lieutenant governor to a former daytime television host. The court counted adherents of at least five religions among them.

Three specific rejections deserve attention. First, the court declined to treat “Judeo-Christian” as a single viewpoint. Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran and Greek Orthodox believers disagree with each other, as do Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews. An evangelical member balances a Catholic member no less than a Buddhist member would. Second, a panel created to examine threats to religious liberty need not seat people who support the policies it was formed to study, any more than a climate committee needs to seat deniers. Third, personal opinions are the wrong measure. Judge Cronan adopted Judge Harry T. Edwards’ concurrence in Public Citizen v. National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, which read the statute to judge balance by members’ employment status and background rather than by their private beliefs.

The opinion is unusually blunt about the plaintiffs’ evidence. It calls several allegations borderline misleading. Rabbi Soloveichik’s supposed position on church and state came from a rhetorical question in a 2006 Torah U-Madda article. Ben Carson’s quoted line about church and state working together to promote godly principles was preceded, in the same 2019 remarks, by a statement that separation means neither institution dominates the other. The phrase attributed to Ryan Anderson opposing a “completely secular state” was Benedictine College’s summary of his description of a 1960 John F. Kennedy campaign speech, and the same source quotes Anderson endorsing the institutional separation of church and state.

Counting the allegations at their strongest still left a ratio of nine voting members to four, plus three non-voting officials. That, the court held, is not an extreme case.

Why did the transparency claims fail?

Section 1009(b) contains no deadline. That single omission decided the claim. A committee does not violate the statute by withholding materials during the course of its work, and the Commission has not held its final meeting.

The timeline of the disclosures is its own story. On April 28, 2026, the day their opposition brief was due, defendants filed a declaration stating that all meeting notices, videos, transcripts, minutes, public comments and submitted materials had been published. Plaintiffs then identified documents still missing. On May 22, the government filed a supplemental declaration disclosing roughly 60 additional pages of records that had been overlooked.

Plaintiffs asked the court to import a rule from Food Chemical News v. Department of Health and Human Services, a 1992 D.C. Circuit case suggesting that parties should have access to relevant materials before or at the meeting where those materials are used. Judge Cronan declined. The line was a single sentence in an opinion resolving a dispute the parties had already conceded to each other, no court has applied it as a holding in more than thirty years, and the requirement would be impossible to satisfy for minutes and transcripts that can only exist after a meeting ends.

The court then took judicial notice of the Commission’s website, where witness lists, witness statements, agendas, transcripts and video recordings now appear. The specific allegations in the complaint are no longer true. Plaintiffs may be right that the production remains incomplete, but they never amended to say so with particularity, and the burden to plead a violation rests with them.

How does this ruling affect religious liberty litigation?

The practical effect is that a federal court will not police the religious composition of a federal advisory body. That holding is neutral as to party. An administration of any political stripe can convene a commission on religion in public life and seat it without a Catholic, an evangelical, a Muslim or a Sikh, and the same deference applies. Groups seeking a seat at the table will find the courthouse closed and the political process open.

The reasoning on membership faith is the sharpest part of the opinion for practitioners. The court held that the faith of a member is not relevant to a function defined as producing a report on religious liberty in America, and that the particular deity a person worships need not affect that person’s views on public policy. Read broadly, that principle resists the assumption that religious identity predicts legal position, an assumption that appears in litigation on both sides of the church-state divide.

The opinion records that the Commission is not entirely without non-Judeo-Christian input. Ismail Royer, a Muslim who directs the Islam and Religious Freedom Action Team at the Religious Freedom Institute, sits on one of the advisory boards created by the executive order to advise Commission members.

What happens next?

The Commission has not held its final meeting. Its website states that attendance information will be posted online and in the Federal Register at least seven days beforehand. At that meeting the members will review public comments on the June 26 draft, discuss it, and finalize the report for delivery to the President. The panel’s authority runs to Sept. 30, 2027.

On the litigation, the organizational plaintiffs’ claims were dismissed with prejudice, which forecloses amendment in this action and leaves appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit as the remaining route. Where federal officers are parties, the notice of appeal is due within 60 days of entry of judgment. Raushenbush’s dismissal was without prejudice, so his claims could be refiled on a different record. Nothing now pending in the Southern District of New York blocks publication of the report.

EDITORIAL COMMENTARY

The following section is opinion. It is separate from the reported account above.

Read the opinion closely and you will find a judge doing something judges rarely admit out loud: refusing a job Congress declined to give him. The fair balance clause has been on the books since 1972 and nobody has ever been able to say what it means. Which viewpoints count? How many members does a viewpoint need? Who legitimately speaks for one? Judge Cronan poses those questions and then makes the honest observation that the answers are political, and that Congress deliberately struck specific membership standards from the bill as the price of passage. A court that supplies the missing standard is not interpreting a statute. It is writing one.

The plaintiffs handed the court an easier task than they needed to. Their brief quoted a 2006 academic article by Rabbi Soloveichik, cut a Ben Carson quotation off at the point where it stopped helping them, and attributed to Ryan Anderson a phrase that a college website had written about him. Judge Cronan called this borderline misleading. He was being polite. When the record itself contradicts your characterization of the record, you have lost more than the motion. You have lost the reader.

There is a lesson here for religious liberty advocates who liked the outcome. The reasoning is a two-edged sword and it was forged that way on purpose. If a court cannot ask whether a commission on religion has enough Sikhs, it cannot ask whether one has enough Baptists. Some future administration will convene an advisory panel on religion in American life, staff it with people who believe the free exercise clause has been read far too generously for far too long, and cite this very opinion when the objectors arrive. That is what neutral principles cost. They cost you the case you wanted to win later.

The transparency ruling is the one that should trouble everyone. Congress wrote a disclosure command and forgot to write a deadline, and the government spent nearly a year of hearings without publishing witness lists, statements, minutes or complete transcripts. It published them on the day its brief was due, missed 60 pages, and published those three weeks later after opposing counsel pointed at the hole. Under the court’s reading, none of that was a violation, since the panel is still working. A disclosure duty that ripens only after the work is finished protects nothing that public disclosure is for. The remedy is not judicial improvisation. It is an amendment to Section 1009(b) containing four words about when.

Citations

Cronan, John P. Opinion and Order. The Interfaith Alliance v. Trump, No. 1:26-cv-01075 (JPC), Dkt. 67, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, 27 July 2026.

United States, President (Trump). “Establishment of the Religious Liberty Commission.” Executive Order 14291, 90 Fed. Reg. 19,417, 7 May 2025, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/07/2025-08134/establishment-of-the-religious-liberty-commission

U.S. Department of Justice. “Meeting of the Religious Liberty Commission.” Federal Register, 28 May 2025, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/28/2025-09557/meeting-of-the-religious-liberty-commission

U.S. Department of Justice. Religious Liberty Commission: Commissioners and Advisory Board Members, captured 22 July 2026, https://perma.cc/2RA8-DMS4

U.S. Department of Justice. Religious Liberty Commission: Resources, captured 22 July 2026, https://perma.cc/7NL4-W9Y2

The White House. “President Trump Announces Religious Liberty Commission Members.” 1 May 2025, captured 22 July 2026, https://perma.cc/BA75-BC97

Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C. Sections 1001-1014 (2022).

Public Citizen v. U.S. Department of Justice, 491 U.S. 440 (1989).

Public Citizen v. National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods, 886 F.2d 419 (D.C. Cir. 1989).

National Anti-Hunger Coalition v. Executive Committee of the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, 711 F.2d 1071 (D.C. Cir. 1983).

Food Chemical News v. Department of Health and Human Services, 980 F.2d 1468 (D.C. Cir. 1992).

Natural Resources Defense Council v. Department of the Interior, 410 F. Supp. 3d 582 (S.D.N.Y. 2019).

Havens Realty Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 363 (1982).

FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, 602 U.S. 367 (2024).

TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, 594 U.S. 413 (2021).

Levine, Richard O. “Comment: The Federal Advisory Committee Act.” Harvard Journal on Legislation, vol. 10, 1973, p. 217.

Walters, Daniel E. “The Justiciability of Fair Balance under the Federal Advisory Committee Act: Toward a Deliberative Process Approach.” Michigan Law Review, vol. 110, 2012, p. 677.

Croley, Steven P., and William F. Funk. “The Federal Advisory Committee Act and Good Government.” Yale Journal on Regulation, vol. 14, 1997, p. 451.

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Tags

Religious Liberty Commission, Federal Advisory Committee Act, Interfaith Alliance v. Trump, church and state, First Amendment litigation