Judge blocks Trump’s freeze of federal grants
Published 11:40 am Tuesday, January 28, 2025
A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s effort to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal grants and loans, siding for now with activists who said the order was illegal.
Judge Loren AliKhan’s decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by the activist group Democracy Forward. The group argued that the order, issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget, violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedures Act, a law that governs the executive branch’s rule-making authorities.
The suit was separate from a pending action by attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia, which was also expected to seek to thwart President Donald Trump’s effort to freeze funding pending his administration’s review of whether the spending comported with his priorities.
Skye Perryman, Democracy Forward’s president and CEO, praised the initial ruling. “We are grateful for this administrative stay to allow our clients time to sort through the chaos created by the Trump administration’s hasty and ill-advised actions and bring more fulsome briefing to the court,” she said in a statement.
The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This ruling marks the second time that a federal judge has intervened to pause Trump’s expansive interpretation of his own powers in order to let a legal challenge proceed. On Thursday, Judge John C. Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order that blocked an attempt by Trump to end automatic citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil.
The funding freeze, announced Monday night in a two-page memo from Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, directs federal agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” specifically citing “DEI, woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.” The meaning of the directive was unclear, and plunged state agencies, city governments and nonprofit organizations into confusion.
AliKhan’s order came as access to federal money began drying up for programs large and small, causing chaos across the country. State health agencies said they had been locked out of their Medicaid reimbursement portals. State officials said funding for preschools, community health centers, food for low-income families, housing assistance and disaster relief was at risk. Universities were freezing new research grants.
With even Republican states pleading for guidance, the White House and its budget office tried Tuesday afternoon to dial back perceptions about the order’s scope, saying the funding pause “does not apply across-the-board” and was limited to programs implicated by the president’s executive orders, including those on DEI efforts and funding for nongovernmental organizations “that undermine the national interest.”
A question-and-answer document released by the budget office as a follow-up said that the freeze was limited to those programs “implicated by the President’s Executive Orders” and that “mandatory programs like Medicaid” would “continue without pause.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
