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Column: Courts finally move to end right-wing judge shopping, but the damage may already be done
Some lawsuits are won by smart lawyers and some on the facts. But nothing spells success as much as the ability to pick your own judge.
That’s the lesson taught by conservative activists who have moved in federal courts to overturn government programs and policies on abortion, contraception, immigration, gun control, student loan relief and vaccine mandates, among other issues.
In recent years they’ve gamed the judicial system to get their lawsuits heard by judges they knew would be sure to see things their way. The process is known as judge shopping, and the committee that makes policy for the federal courts just moved to put an end to it.
The courts have now formally recognized the need to do something about a really troubling pattern of judge shopping.
— Amanda Shanor, University of Pennsylvania constitutional law expert
In a policy statement and official guidance issued last week, the Judicial Conference of the United States said that henceforth, any lawsuit seeking a statewide or nationwide injunction against a government policy or action should be assigned at random to a judge in the federal district where it’s filed.
If that sounds a bit vague to the layperson, its target is crystal clear to legal experts: It’s aimed at right-wing activists and politicians who have filed their cases in federal courthouses presided over by highly partisan judges in Texas. Most of those judges were appointed by Donald Trump.
It would be bad enough if those judges’ rulings applied only within their judicial districts or affected only the plaintiffs. But the judges have issued sweeping nationwide injunctions that block government programs and policies coast-to-coast.
As Ian Millhiser of Vox put it, this is America’s “Matthew Kacsmaryk problem.” Kacsmaryk is the Trump-appointed Texas federal judge who most recently attempted to outlaw mifepristone, a widely used abortion medication, nationwide. His April 2023 ruling has been temporarily stayed by the Supreme Court, but it’s still on the docket, ticking away.
But Kacsmaryk is not alone. As recently as March 8, Judge J. Campbell Barker, a Trump appointee who presides over 50% of the civil cases filed in his rustic courthouse in Tyler, Texas, invalidated a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board broadening the standard by which big corporations could be held jointly responsible for the welfare and unionization rights of workers employed by their franchisees.
How serious a blow could the judicial conference’s policy be to conservatives aiming to roll back civil rights? Massive, judging from the reaction of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Only 48 hours after the conference announced its initiative, McConnell wrote to the chief judges of all judicial districts urging them to ignore the new policy.
This was an audacious move, considering that the presiding officer of the Judicial Council is Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., its membership comprises the chief judges of the 12 judicial circuits and one judge from a district court in each circuit, and its role is to set policy for the entire federal court system.
McConnell asserted that only Congress can make the rules for the assignment of federal trial judges, but that’s dubious. In an analysis last year, the Justice Department concluded that the Supreme Court has full authority to impose rules of civil procedure in the federal courts, including a rule mandating that all federal judicial districts assign judges randomly to civil lawsuits aimed at statewide or nationwide injunctions. The Judicial Council’s policy isn’t the same as as a Supreme Court rule, but it’s a fair bet that if pushed, the court would issue the rule.
McConnell also asserted that the Judicial Conference had been pressured into acting by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), but that’s untrue. Although Schumer has spoken out against judge shopping, numerous legal experts and Roberts himself have expressed concerns about the practice.
“The courts have now formally recognized the need to do something about a really troubling pattern of judge shopping,” Amanda Shanor, a constitutional law expert at the University of Pennsylvania, said of the Judicial Conference’s initiative.
What’s yet unclear is whether the conference’s initiative goes far enough. Its policy statement is described as “guidance,” not a mandate. it acknowledges the district courts’ “authority and discretion” to manage their dockets as they see fit.
Last year, Shanor, with Alice Clapman and Jennifer Ahearn of NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice, proposed that the conference require all judicial districts to use a “random or blind procedure” to distribute cases among all the judges in the district when the litigants seek an injunction or other relief that would extend beyond the district’s borders.
The practice traditionally labeled “forum shopping” is not especially new. The earliest case cited by legal experts dates back to 1842, when a litigant chose to file a lawsuit in federal rather than state court in New York to gain a strategic advantage over his adversary.
Plaintiffs have been known to choose a venue based on local statutes of limitation, or a sense that juries in a region might be more amenable to their case, or because their location may be more convenient for parties or witnesses.
More recently, however, the practice has been heavily abused for partisan and ideological purposes. This results from two trends. One is the increasing partisanship of individual federal judges, especially those appointed by Trump. The second is those judges’ habit of issuing nationwide injunctions against government policies or programs.
Nationwide injunctions can impose parochial partisan ideologies on the whole country. Through 2023, the state of Texas filed more than 31 federal lawsuits challenging Biden administration policies — but not a single one in federal court in Austin, which is the state capital but an island of blue in a red state.
The state had filed seven lawsuits in Amarillo, where by local procedure every one was automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk; six in Victoria, where all civil cases are assigned to Trump appointee Drew B. Tipton; and four in Galveston, where all civil cases come before Trump appointee Jeff Brown.
The rest were filed in divisions with two judges, most of whom are also Trump appointees or conservative appointees of George W. Bush. In the Tyler division from which Barker issued his NLRB decision, all the cases he doesn’t get are assigned to Judge Jeremy Kernodle, also a Trump appointee.
Although some nationwide injunctions have been lifted by the Supreme Court, that process seldom happens speedily. The result is that the plaintiffs effectively win by losing, as injunctions against government policies can have “the lasting systemic effect of blocking these policies for months or years,” Shanor, Clapman and Ahearn observed.
Kacsmaryk got the mifepristone case for two reasons. First, antiabortion activists knew of his strong antiabortion inclinations. Second, the policy in the Northern District of Texas is to assign cases to judges in the division where they’re filed.
Kacsmaryk is the only judge sitting in the Amarillo division of the Northern District of Texas. So it was an easy call for the mifepristone plaintiffs to file there, knowing that their chance of drawing Kacsmaryk as their judge was 100%.
The same pattern drove plaintiffs to file lawsuits against Biden administration initiatives in the same district’s Fort Worth division, which has two judges, Trump appointee Mark T. Pittman and George W. Bush appointee Reed O’Connor. Both have been sought by conservative litigants. O’Connor also presides over 100% of the cases filed in the district’s Wichita Falls courthouse, where he is the only judge.
Pittman obligingly overturned Biden’s student loan relief program in 2022. Just this month, he ruled the government’s 55-year-old Minority Business Development Agency to be unconstitutional and ordered it opened to contract applicants of all races — obviously a ruling that defeats the purpose of a program designed to help minorities get a start in the business world. O’Connor tried to declare the entire Affordable Care Act unconstitutional in 2018. The Supreme Court overruled him in 2021.
The judicial conference’s initiative is long overdue.
Customarily, rulings by federal trial judges have constituted precedents binding at most on other judges in a particular judicial district or resulted in court orders benefiting only the plaintiffs who filed the case.
Matters are different “when a court effectively can bind the entire nation with an injunction” that applies to “an unlimited range of persons and to conduct occurring in … an equally unlimited array of places,” legal scholar Ronald A. Cass wrote in 2018.
The prospect of sweeping rulings incentivizes “an extreme race to courthouses more inclined to issue nationwide injunctions and more sympathetic to the plaintiff’s position,” Cass wrote.
In its latest incarnation, “litigants effectively have the ability to effectively choose an actual judge,” Shanor told me.
“We don’t know how the policy will be rolled out, what exactly is in it, or how much of it is a recommendation rather than a requirement,” she says. “A policy may be effective, but having a rule would advance the fairness and randomness of the distribution of these nationally important cases, and ensure the perceived legitimacy of the courts.”
One is that the policy won’t apply to cases that have already been assigned to a judge. Another is that litigants can still try to game the system by filing their lawsuits in states from which appeals are heard by circuit courts known to have a particular partisan lean.
That’s a major issue with Texas cases, which are funneled on appeal to the 5th Circuit, sitting in New Orleans. That court has been the source of right-wing decisions so loopy that they’ve been slapped down by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Of that circuit’s 17 active judges, six are Trump appointees.
McConnell’s objection to the Judicial Conference’s policy thus should be seen in context. He had more to do than anyone else with embedding Trumpian judges in the federal judiciary, where they wreak havoc on government policies and programs that help ordinary Americans, not just corporations and the rich. The conference’s initiative may be the first step toward a more fair-minded judiciary, but it’s a crucial one.
To understand how Mr. Trump has achieved this omnipresence, The New York Times reviewed the first 329 days of his second term, finding at least one instance each day when he attracted the public’s attention to himself and his actions.
The review encompassed more than 250 media appearances, more than 320 official appearances, and more than 5,000 Truth Social posts or reposts. The analysis shows that while Mr. Trump has lagged his predecessors in his number of official appearances, he has pursued a raft of innovative methods to force himself into the public consciousness on a daily, and sometimes even hourly, basis.
The battery of activity started from the moment he was inaugurated, when he traveled from the Capitol Building to the Capital One Arena to publicly sign a flurry of executive orders.
Since then, he has stayed in the public eye in part by doing things no president has ever done. High-stakes Oval Office meetings, like his negotiations with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are held on-camera and broadcast live on global news networks. His Q.-and-A. sessions with reporters frequently last an hour or more.
He regularly airs his opinions – on social media, in discursive asides at rallies – about idiosyncratic subjects that range widely across the zeitgeist, from Sydney Sweeney’s sexy denim ads to the redesigned logo of the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain to the mysterious fate of the aviator Amelia Earhart, who vanished over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.
And his engagement with the news media has soared well beyond the start of his first administration.
Through Dec. 14, Mr. Trump took reporters’ questions on 449 occasions, compared with 223 during the same period of his first term. On average, Mr. Trump has interacted with journalists roughly twice a day, doubling his rate from 2017, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University political scientist who tracks presidential press interactions. Mr. Trump limits which news outlets can ask questions at small events, but in sheer volume, he is the most media-accessible modern president, and far outpaces his predecessor, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Reporters will be in my office asking me for the president’s reaction to a breaking news story,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in an interview. “And I’ll just say to them, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you ask him yourself in 30 minutes?’”
President Trump’s media appearances have soared this year, more than doubling both the Biden administration’s and those of his own first term.
Finding the Cameras
Many of his public moments go viral online, like his diatribe about restoring the name of the Washington Redskins, or the A.I.-generated video meme he posted of himself dribbling a soccer ball with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office. They take on a life of their own, rippling across social media and dissected and amplified by influencers and mass media platforms alike.
The result is a president whose not-so-inner monologue is injected into our daily lives in myriad ways, when we are watching TV on the weekends or idly scrolling the web – a Greek chorus for our national narrative.
“He’s the most ubiquitous president ever,” said Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian.
The media strategy aligns with his political strategy.
Dating back to his years as an outspoken real estate developer and reality TV star, Mr. Trump has relished being unavoidable for comment. But at age 79, he has been outdoing his younger self. And there is a logic to his logorrhea.
Mr. Trump’s allies often speak of the political benefits of flooding the zone: pursuing so many policies, ideas, and dramatic restructurings of the normal ways of governance as to overwhelm the system. “All pedal, no brake,” as Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s one-time adviser, has called it.
“We joke internally that he is our ultimate director of communications,” Ms. Leavitt said. “He has incredible media instincts, and he is the final decision maker on all policy, and he has been in a ‘flood the zone,’ ‘do as much as possible’ mindset since he walked into the Oval Office on Jan. 20.”
All presidents benefit from the awesome news-making powers of the office, with its agenda-setting influence over a dedicated global press corps. But Mr. Trump has outstripped his predecessors in whipsawing the public’s attention onto matters small and large – and limiting the level of scrutiny that any one shocking remark or policy proposal receives.
“People can really only focus on a handful of things a day,” said Bill Burton, a deputy White House press secretary under former President Barack Obama. “This attention flood is working for Trump because he is able to do an extraordinary amount of executive actions and very little of it can get attention.”
Or as Mr. Brinkley put it: “He plays to win the day, every day, around the clock.”
His commentary takes on a life of its own.
One of Mr. Trump’s political assets is his instinct for virality.
With a natural feel for the web, Mr. Trump has a knack for amplifying wacky memes and pop culture curios that can drive days of online discourse. Sometimes, coverage of his offhand remarks or late-night social media posts can crowd out the more significant, norm-shattering changes he is making to American governance.
Late one Friday night in May, the president posted an obviously A.I.-generated image of himself as the pope. It struck a nerve.
Mr. Trump had already courted controversy days earlier, after the death of Pope Francis on April 21.
“I’d like to be pope,” the president told reporters who asked about who should become the next pontiff. “That would be my number one choice.”
The comment disturbed some Catholics, who said the notion was crude and insensitive. That reaction seemed only to prompt Mr. Trump to double down, posting the A.I.-generated image to his Truth Social account days later. By the weekend it had become a cultural phenomenon, mocked on “Saturday Night Live” and called out by experts as an example of misleading A.I. content.
After Mr. Trump posts the A.I. image …
May 2
Trump posts A.I. image of himself as Pope
There is nothing clever or funny about this image, Mr. President. We just buried our beloved Pope Francis and the cardinals are about to enter a solemn conclave to elect a new successor of St. Peter. Do not mock us.
May 3
NYS Catholic Conference says “do not mock us”
May 3
“Saturday Night Live” covers fake image
May 3 Vatican asked about image, declines to comment
May 4
Cardinal Joseph Tobin of New Jersey criticizes image as “not good”
May 4
JD Vance defends Trump on X, calling it a joke … some Catholics were outraged, prompting a news cycle focused on the controversy …
5
Says “the Catholics loved it”
… before Mr. Trump suggested he had nothing to do with it.
Mr. Trump, who is not Catholic, had plenty of defenders, too. They said his commentary and the A.I. image were simply jokes, part of the president’s unique comedic style.
“As a general rule, I’m fine with people telling jokes and not fine with people starting stupid wars that kill thousands of my countrymen,” Vice President JD Vance, who is Catholic, wrote on X.
In his quest for attention, the president is often aided by a cottage industry of right-wing influencers and activists who are primed to syndicate, reinforce and defend whatever content he pushes out each day. For this conservative media ecosystem, Mr. Trump’s messaging and commentary are the raw fuel that drives clicks, shares and views.
On June 7, the president’s visit to a raucous U.F.C. fight – complete with a “Trump dance” entrance into the arena – generated an immediate spike in online interest, including about 50,000 posts on X. Five days later, when he promoted a “Trump gold card” visa, his announcement led to roughly 30,000 posts on X.
A barrage that distracts from bad news.
One pattern in Mr. Trump’s behavior: When his administration is faced with bad news, he launches a fusillade of distraction.
This can take the form of outlandish, out-of-left-field claims about political opponents. Or he might weigh in on a pop culture subject far afield from Washington politics – from the ratings of late-night hosts like Seth Meyers to the physical appearance of a megastar like Taylor Swift.
The events of July 2025 offer a case in point.
As the Jeffrey Epstein files returned to the news – along with speculation that Mr. Trump might appear in them – the president embarked on a breathtaking series of tangents. Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that former President Bill Clinton had bankrolled an effort by senior intelligence officials to frame him for a crime, mused about stripping the actress Rosie O’Donnell of her U.S. citizenship, and accused the singer Beyoncé of accepting millions of dollars to endorse his erstwhile rival, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
July 8
F.B.I. publishes memo about Epstein files On July 8, the F.B.I. said it would not declassify more Epstein files.
10
Claimed intelligence officials tried to frame him
10
Pushed to defund NPR and PBS
10 Directed ICE to arrest protesters
12
Threatened Rosie O’Donnell’s citizenship
15
Claimed Adam Schiff engaged in mortgage fraud Over the following days, Mr. Trump seemed to lash out in every direction.
On July 18, the Justice Department filed a request to unseal grand jury testimony about Mr. Epstein, again raising questions about Mr. Trump’s involvement. The president promptly lobbed insults at late-night talk show hosts, dismissed the Epstein affair as “fake news” and shared fresh claims about a supposed Obama administration plot to undermine him after the 2016 election.
July 18
Request filed to unseal grand jury testimony
On July 18, the Department of Justice filed a request — later denied — to unseal grand jury testimony.
20
Criticized Washington Commanders name
21
Called the “Russia hoax” the “crime of the century”
22
Called Epstein controversy “fake news”
22
Criticized Kimmel and Fallon
24 Criticized Federal Reserve chairman
Over the following days, Mr. Trump bounced from topic to topic.
On July 25, The Wall Street Journal published a major scoop: The paper had unearthed a risqué birthday letter that Mr. Trump had apparently written to Mr. Epstein in 2003. Mr. Trump responded with his attack on Beyoncé and revived his threat to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks. Then he announced the imminent construction of an enormous gilded ballroom at the White House, at a cost of $200 million. (He has since revised the cost upward to $400 million.)
Asked if there was a deliberate strategy to distract from negative news, Ms. Leavitt noted that every administration seeks to minimize unhelpful headlines.
“Yes, there have been times in which we’ve tried to do that, but also often it just happens naturally, because the president is willing to weigh in on so many subjects,” she said. “Sometimes it’s really not deliberate. It’s just him speaking his mind on whatever news cycle or news story is brought to him in that moment.”
He has added tricks to his arsenal.
Mr. Trump’s devotion to Truth Social mirrors the hair-trigger Twitter habit of his first term; on one recent December evening, he posted 158 times between 9 p.m. and midnight. And he has continued to appear on Fox News with certain preferred hosts.
But this year, he has added to his media arsenal by appearing in many more public spaces that fall outside of a president’s typical itinerary.
Mr. Trump has stopped by a Washington Commanders N.F.L. game, popped up in the New York Yankees locker room, attended the Ryder Cup golf tournament and the men’s tennis final at the U.S. Open, sat ringside at numerous U.F.C. fights, and traveled to the Daytona 500. He is the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl. When FIFA staged the Club World Cup final in New Jersey, Mr. Trump not only attended, but joined the winning team onstage for the trophy ceremony.
The net effect is a sense of inescapability, that no corner of American life remains Trump-free – which itself amounts to a potent expression of presidential authority and command. “His power, in part,” said Mr. Burton, the former Obama aide, “comes from the attention that people give him, or that he forces on them.”
Can it ever be too much?
In the fall of 2009, President Barack Obama appeared on David Letterman’s talk show, gave interviews to CNBC and Men’s Health magazine, and made the rounds of all five major network Sunday shows. Washington was abuzz about whether he was overexposed.
That debate sounds quaint today. But the question of whether a president can be too visible remains open.
“The public is being desensitized” to Mr. Trump’s omnipresence, argued Mr. Brinkley, the historian. “It starts becoming blather. The enemy for Trump isn’t Democrats; it’s the public being bored with the show.”
Ms. Leavitt said that if there was a risk to his ubiquity, “President Trump would not be president right now.” She added: “He is a businessman who speaks his mind and tells it like it is, and sometimes people don’t like that. But obviously the vast majority of our country does, or else he wouldn’t be in this office.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, the public eventually tired of his frenzied pace. And in some ways, Mr. Trump appears to be slowing down physically as he approaches his 80th birthday in June (which he will celebrate in part by staging a nationally broadcast U.F.C. fight on the White House lawn). He has appeared to doze at some Oval Office meetings, and he is holding fewer formal public events than he did at this point in 2017.
Still, Mr. Trump and his team have embraced the everywhere-all-at-once nature of modern media. Average Americans, busy with work and family, do not tune in for daytime news conferences or Cabinet meetings. And 6:30 p.m. newscasts and local newspapers are no longer the primary vessels by which Americans learn about their commander-in-chief.
Instead, politics now suffuses our lives as a kind of ambient noise – via TikTok videos, social media posts, YouTube talk shows and family Facebook messages – never fully separate from our leisure pursuits. “Right now the game is attention, in terms of what’s culturally breaking through,” Mr. Burton said. “The fact that so much message exists is the point.”
Mr. Trump has both propelled this merging of culture and politics, and continues to strategically exploit it. In December, he became the first president to personally host the Kennedy Center Honors, comparing himself onstage to Johnny Carson and musing that he would do a better job than Jimmy Kimmel.
“This is the greatest evening in the history of the Kennedy Center,” Mr. Trump told the crowd. “Not even a contest. There has never been anything like it.”
His performance will air in prime time on CBS on Dec. 23.
Photo and video sources: Graham Dickie/The New York Times; Doug Mills/The New York Times; Roll Call Factba.se; PBS; Mauro Pimentel/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Kenny Holston/The New York Times; The New York Times; Annabelle Gordon/Reuters; Eric Lee/The New York Times; Fox; Cheriss May for The New York Times; Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press; Margo Martin, via Storyful; Mark Abramson for The New York Times; Global News; Al Drago/Getty Images; Fox News; Dave Sanders for The New York Times; Pete Marovich for The New York Times; Ted Shaffrey/Associated Press … Show all
President Trump’s media company is merging with a nuclear fusion energy firm in a $6-billion deal aimed at generating more power amid growing demand from power-hungry artificial intelligence data centers.
The merger between Trump Media & Technology and TAE Technologies could lead to one of the world’s first publicly traded fusion energy companies, the two companies said Thursday.
What is TAE Technologies?
TAE Technologies is a private company based in Foothill Ranch, Calif. It has been raising funds for commercial-scale nuclear fusion, a method of energy production that supporters say could revolutionize access to electricity. Founded in 1998, the company has built and operated five fusion reactors and raised more than $1.3 billion.
Fusion uses the same process that powers the sun to produce potentially limitless energy. Experts say it hasn’t been achieved on a large scale because the process is volatile and expensive. TAE is trying to develop the technology needed to reduce the size, cost and complexity of fusion reactors.
“Our talented team, through its commitment and dedication to science, is poised to solve the immense global challenge of energy scarcity,” TAE Chief Executive Michl Binderbauer said in a statement. “Recent breakthroughs have prepared us to… commercialize our fusion technology.”
What is the political history of Truth Social?
Truth Social was launched in 2022 as Trump created an alternative to mainstream social media, which was increasingly restricting and blocking his posts and profiles, as well as those of his allies and supporters. It began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange through a 2024 merger with a special purpose acquisition company.
While most social media platforms have lifted restrictions on Trump’s posts, he still primarily posts on his own platform.
Though Trump and companies he is associated with control more than a 40% stake in the company, much of his investment is managed by others to avoid a conflict of interest during his term as president. Some analysts suggest his indirect association with a new company in a highly regulated industry could also lead to issues.
TAE will need significant investment and regulation to advance, which makes Trump’s ties a major conflict, Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, told the Associated Press.
“He’s jumping into this industry just like he jumped into cryptocurrency a couple of years ago,” Painter said. “Just as the United States government is gonna get all involved in it. And it’s so obvious that there’s a huge conflict of interest.”
Trump Media shares, which had fallen more than 80% from their 2024 peak, have skyrocketed around 50% since the deal was announced.
The company now has a market value of more than $4.5 billion.
Why are the companies merging?
The parent company of Trump’s social media site, Truth Social, Trump Media & Technology, previously had little to do with energy production. The company agreed to merge with Alphabet-backed TAE Technologies, with the aim of paving the way for easier access to abundant electricity.
The merger aims to help both companies diversify and raise more money.
It is an attempt to combine Trump Media’s “significant access to capital” with TAE’s “leading fusion technology,” the companies said in a release.
They plan to begin construction in 2026 on the first-ever utility-scale fusion power plant.
“Fusion power plants are expected to provide economic, abundant and dependable electricity that would help America win the AI revolution,” the release said.
The boom in popularity of AI chatbots such as ChatGPT has created a seemingly insatiable new demand for power.
The Georgia Institute of Technology says modern AI data centers use as much electricity as a small city. As AI models grow, they demand even more power.
What are the terms of the deal?
The all-stock transaction announced this week values each share of TAE Technologies at $53.89, although it is a private company. Trump Media has agreed to provide $200 million in cash to TAE upon closing, expected in mid-2026.
When the merger is complete, TAE and Trump Media shareholders will each own about 50% of the combined company.
Trump Media will be the holding company for TAE, TAE Power Solutions and TAE Life Sciences.
The U.S. Space Force announced Friday it has awarded satellite contracts with a combined value of about $1.6 billion to Rocket Lab in Long Beach and to the Redondo Beach Space Park campus of Northrop Grumman.
The contracts by the Space Development Agency will fund the construction by each company of 18 satellites for a network in development that will provide warning of advanced threats such as hypersonic missiles.
Northrop Grumman has been awarded contracts for prior phases of the Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, a planned network of missile defense and communications satellites in low Earth orbit.
The contract announced Friday is valued at $764 million, and the company is now set to deliver a total of 150 satellites for the network.
The $805-million contract awarded to Rocket Lab is its largest to date. It had previously been awarded a $515 million contract to deliver 18 communications satellites for the network.
Founded in 2006 in New Zealand, the company builds satellites and provides small-satellite launch services for commercial and government customers with its Electron rocket. It moved to Long Beach in 2020 from Huntington Beach and is developing a larger rocket.
“This is more than just a contract. It’s a resounding affirmation of our evolution from simply a trusted launch provider to a leading vertically integrated space prime contractor,” said Rocket Labs founder and chief executive Peter Beck in online remarks.
The company said it could eventually earn up to $1 billion due to the contract by supplying components to other builders of the satellite network.
Also awarded contracts announced Friday were a Lockheed Martin group in Sunnyvalle, Calif., and L3Harris Technologies of Fort Wayne, Ind. Those contracts for 36 satellites were valued at nearly $2 billion.
Gurpartap “GP” Sandhoo, acting director of the Space Development Agency, said the contracts awarded “will achieve near-continuous global coverage for missile warning and tracking” in addition to other capabilities.
Northrop Grumman said the missiles are being built to respond to the rise of hypersonic missiles, which maneuver in flight and require infrared tracking and speedy data transmission to protect U.S. troops.
Beck said that the contracts reflects Rocket Labs growth into an “industry disruptor” and growing space prime contractor.
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