A federal judge on Friday extended an order blocking the Trump administration from withholding funds for child care and social services in five Democratic-led states, keeping at bay for now cuts that the states say are politically motivated and would harm hundreds of thousands of people.
The order from Judge Vernon S. Broderick in New York stops the administration from carrying out its threat to restrict as much as $10 billion in funding for Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois and Colorado.
The states had abruptly learned of the planned suspension on Jan. 5, as President Trump railed against a major welfare fraud scheme that has rocked Minnesota, and claimed, without evidence, that similar frauds were playing out in other Democratic states. The states quickly sued, and a judge issued an order temporarily pre-empting the freeze.
The new order will keep funding flowing for the duration of the case, which has emerged as a crucial flashpoint in Mr. Trump’s push to test the boundaries of his ability to use the federal government’s vast powers to reward political allies and punish political foes.
In their lawsuit, the states wrote that the Trump administration had moved to choke off funding for three major programs that serve low-income families and people with disabilities. That included around $7.3 billion through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and nearly $2.4 billion from the Child Care and Development Fund, in addition to a number of smaller social service grants.
The programs overwhelmingly support low-income families who balance parenting with attending school, receiving professional training or other demands. Taken together, the states wrote in their lawsuit, the loss amounted to a far larger gap than any state budget could realistically cover, jeopardizing the stability of hundreds of thousands of households.
The Trump administration invoked the Minnesota fraud in its letters to the five states announcing the funding cutoff. But it did not cite any evidence of fraud in the other four states, and the facts of the Minnesota case differed significantly from what the administration appeared to maintain in the letters.
The letters suggested that undocumented immigrants in Minnesota were misusing child care and social services programs. But those charged with fraud in Minnesota were accused of abusing a pandemic-era program for feeding children, not the programs the administration has targeted, and were overwhelmingly U.S. citizens.
Lawyers representing the government have argued that the freeze was intended to buy the federal government time to review the programs for evidence of fraud. During a hearing in January, a government lawyer said the administration’s goal was to impose additional requirements and questions on future withdrawals of funds, not to enact a full freeze.
The Trump administration has used the same rationale to justify freezes of other federal programs, such as the country’s entire foreign aid bureaucracy and other domestic grant programs. Judges have repeatedly found the freezes arbitrary and unlawful.
Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, said in an interview that the administration had rushed to pause funding without citing any clear evidence of fraud.
“It was a very clearly partisan attack on five blue states for no other reason that we can decipher besides we’re blue,” said Mr. Bonta, whose state would have lost access to roughly $5 billion.
During a hearing in January, government lawyers told Judge Broderick that the freeze was initiated because of reports produced by conservative content creators about ostensible fraud in Minnesota day care centers. They said the Trump administration had indicated it planned to review many more states after the initial review of the five involved in the lawsuit.
The ruling also blocked the administration from compelling the five Democratic states to provide a trove of documents it said was needed to filter out fraudulent use of welfare funds by undocumented immigrants.
The three programs the administration targeted allow states broad discretion to devise ways to support families and children in need.
In New York, the federal dollars for TANF, the cash assistance program, also fund emergency homeless and domestic violence shelters. The loss of the funds would have forced many shelters to close, said Michael Polenberg, a vice president of Safe Horizon, a nonprofit that provides services for victims of domestic violence.
“We are very, very relieved,” Mr. Polenberg said in an interview. “This hopefully will sound send a resounding message that the federal government can’t just cut critically important funding for no reason.”
Minho Kim reports on breaking news for The Times from Washington.
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