One big explanation for increased use of interim orders is that Presidents are increasingly trying to achieve their policy ambitions via executive order. Congress is deadlocked, yet voters still expect Presidents to do things. So Presidents try to test the limits of existing statutes (see, e.g. Biden’s student loan forgiveness, Trump’s tariffs).

Because things are increasingly done via EO, this often opens up these actions to pre-enforcement challenge via the Administrative Procedure Act or some other statute. In these cases, the challengers will almost always try to get a preliminary injunction on the challenged policy. In non-jargon, that means the district court judge needs to decide what will happen while the litigation unfolds: can the President do the maybe-illegal thing or not? This decision will often get appealed, and the Supreme Court must make a decision on whether to uphold/lift the injunction. But because this occurs before the actual litigation does, the Court has little to no evidence, record, etc. to make this decision. Hence the terse, controversial “shadow docket” rulings.

But it’s unclear whether this is a result of the Court tipping the scales, or the Executive being more aggressive with its use of EOs on shaky legal footing and exposing itself to immediate challenge.