President Donald Trump’s attempt to freeze all federal grants and loans hit a brick wall Monday, with a federal judge ordering the government to keep cutting checks to those programs.
U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan extended her one-week restraining order on the Office of Management and Budget for the foreseeable future, putting several of Trump’s rapid-fire cost-cutting executive orders on the slow track of litigation in federal court.
The Trump administration was widely criticized for throwing the country into chaos with the OMB order freezing all federal grants. The White House later rescinded the memo but said the underlying policy was still in effect. But when Justice Department lawyers tried to use that pullback as an excuse to stop the judge from intervening, AliKhan wasn’t buying it.
Calling the political maneuver a “rescission,” the judge pointed to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s own public statements on social media that “this is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.” The judge noted what she called the “constant shifting of the factual landscape” and said the Trump administration couldn’t disrupt the lives of Americans who rely on government funding with zero notice.
“The potential scope of the freeze is as great as $3 trillion and its effects are difficult to fully grasp. Plaintiffs point to news reports detailing far-reaching effects: preschools could not pay their staff; Los Angeles and North Carolina were denied disaster relief aid; and elderly Americans who relied on subsidized programs for food did not know if their next meal would come. The court concludes that the balance of the equities and public interest heavily favor granting Plaintiffs’ request,” she wrote.
Earlier in the day, career DOJ lawyers assigned to the case tried to limit the judge’s actions, asking her to narrow any pause to only the nonprofits suing in this particular case. Federal lawyers also tried to convince the judge that she would be exceeding her judicial powers by halting the Trump policy nationwide. They also tried to restrict the scope of any judicial intervention, asking the judge to leave what amounts to a gaping loophole that would allow OMB to cut funding for any number of other reasons.
But again, the judge wasn’t deterred. AliKhan ordered that the Trump administration is “enjoined from implementing, giving effect to, or reinstating under a different name the directives in OMB Memorandum M-25-13 with respect to the disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards.”
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.