Neomi Rao

Neomi Rao is a Trump-appointed judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where she has been described as a “rubber stamp for the Trump administration’s preferred outcomes.” Rao, who clerked for Clarence Thomas, is widely considered to be on the shortlist of potential Trump U.S. Supreme Court nominees. Before being nominated to the D.C. Circuit, Rao was the administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) in the Trump administration

As described in the Balls and Strikes series titled “The Worst Trump Judge in America,” Rao routinely sought to protect the Trump administration in disputes with Congress: “What sets her apart, even from other Trump judges, is her dogged, relentless defense of the man who appointed her to the bench, no matter how sizeable the legal obstacles he’s faced… In 2019 and 2020, the D.C. Circuit heard a series of cases in which it ultimately allowed Congress to obtain information from Trump’s businesses, and from a grand jury that had been investigating him for potential crimes. Rao dissented three separate times. Twice, she argued that Congress could not investigate a president’s potentially criminal conduct outside of the impeachment process. Her opinions would have allowed any president to refuse to answer a congressional request about any matter if the president could argue that it could incriminate him. Those cases, of course, are precisely where Congress really should get that information—if it couldn’t, it would be even harder for Congress to decide when it needs to decide to impeach the president in the first place.”

Rao also authored an “astonishing” opinion in favor of Michael Flynn, Trump’s former National Security Adviser and a prominent leader in the Christian Nationalist movement who, among other things, pledged an oath to QAnon and pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia, before he was pardoned by Trump.

She also wrote a dissent in Mazars v. U.S. where she claimed that “allegations of illegal conduct against the President cannot be investigated by Congress except through impeachment.” Her dissent, which was issued before the unprecedented edict by Chief Justice John Roberts to grant Trump immunity, was widely mocked and panned by legal experts. The Atlantic’s David Frum wrote that Rao’s Mazars dissent was “wild talk that would shut down almost all congressional investigations.”

Before becoming a judge, Rao reportedly weaponized her agency, OIRA, and led sweeping efforts to roll back environmental protections to advance Trump’s agenda. In the agency’s 2018 year-end report Rao claimed “we are working to push back the expansion of the administrative state, which has placed undue burdens on the public and impeded economic growth.” The report noted that there were 176 deregulatory actions made by the Trump Administration that year.

Under her leadership, OIRA approved a series of actions by the Betsy DeVos-led Department of Education “that would encourage, and sometimes require, schools to set up unfair procedures that disadvantage survivors of sexual harassment, including sexual assault, and raise the threshold for when schools must respond to sexual harassment, including sexual assault, against students and employees,” as described by the National Women’s Law Center.

Before joining the Trump administration, Rao taught at George Mason Law School (later renamed to the Antonin Scalia School of Law after Barre Seid and Charles Koch donated $30 million to the school), from 2006 to 2017. She helped launch the GMU Center for the Study of the Administrative State in 2015 (now called the C. Boyden Gray Center, named for the tobacco heir). In emails from 2017, the Dean at George Mason wrote to Gray that he hoped to lure Rao back from the Trump administration with a $1.5 million endowed professorship: “This chair would help me to entice Neomi to return home to Scalia Law after she dismantles the administrative state while serving at OIRA.”

During her 2019 nomination to the vacancy on the D.C. Circuit caused by Brett Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court, articles Rao wrote for the Yale Herald came to light, including one she wrote that blaming women who are survivors of dates who rape them. She wrote that “unless someone made her drinks undetectably strong or forced them down her throat, a woman, like a man, decides when and how much to drink. And if she drinks to the point where she can no longer choose, well, getting to that point was part of her choice.”

In another article titled “The Feminist Dilemma” Rao wrote in the Yale Free Press that anti-feminist Camile Paglia “accurately describes the dangerous feminist idealism which teaches women that they are equal” and that “a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober… just as women want to control their education and then choose their career, similarly, they must learn to understand and accept responsibility for their sexuality.” Rao, in another article asserted that “in this age of affirmative action, women’s rights, special rights for the handicapped and welfare for the indigent and lazy, elitism is a forgotten and embarrassing concept.”

Rao has long-standing ties to the right-wing political ecosystem affiliated with and funded by Charles Koch and Leonard Leo. Since 1996, she has been a member of the Federalist Society, which Leo now co-chairs. In 2006, after Judge Samuel Alito was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court, Rao was on his “murder board” to prepare him for the hearings. Her nomination to the D.C. Circuit was controversial, but she was confirmed to the bench after her nomination was backed up by a six-figure ad campaign from Leo’s Judicial Crisis Network and a digital and grassroots campaign by Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. She was also championed by a host of far-right groups, including many members of the Project 2025 Advisory Board, the Heritage Foundation, and the Independent Women’s Forum.