A federal judge extended a block on the Office of Management and Budget’s sweeping order to freeze trillions in congressionally appropriated funds to federal agencies.
Judge Loren AliKhan sided Tuesday with a coalition of nonprofits that had sued the government over the budget freeze, describing the potential fallout of the Trump administration’s interference as “economically catastrophic” and in some cases “fatal” for the group that brought the case.
“In the simplest terms, the freeze was ill-conceived from the beginning,” AliKhan wrote in her ruling. “Defendants either wanted to pause up to $3 trillion in federal spending practically overnight, or they expected each federal agency to review every single one of its grants, loans, and funds for compliance in less than twenty-four hours. The breadth of that command is almost unfathomable.”
The extension is yet another blow to Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink federal spending. The coalition, which consisted of the National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, Main Street Alliance, and SAGE, had asked the court to halt the freeze on the basis that OMB does not have the authority to unilaterally shutter funding to hundreds of agencies that have already had their spending approved by Congress.
The spending suspension would have impacted upward of 2,600 accounts across the government and paused the distributions of tens of billions of dollars to programs across the nation unless those agencies proved that their funding initiatives fell in line with his agenda.
The Trump administration gave federal agencies mere hours to prove that their programs did not promote or support elements that Trump has derided as “woke” ideology, including “environmental justice,” abortion, DEI initiatives, and “woke gender” programs, or provide services to “illegal aliens,” in order to tap back into the cashflow, according to an OMB memo.
Programs that were expected to be impacted by the ax included infrastructure initiatives, housing assistance, disaster relief, educational programs, grants for suicide-prevention efforts, including the suicide lifeline, money for rural hospitals, opioid prevention funding, and HIV/AIDS treatment.
AliKhan had previously issued a temporary restraining order on the freeze but ultimately agreed with the nonprofits that the government “may be crossing a constitutional line” in attempting to completely choke Congress’s purse strings.
“The scope of power OMB seeks to claim is ‘breathtaking,’ and its ramifications are massive,” wrote AliKhan. “Because there is no clear statutory hook for this broad assertion of power, plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of this claim.”
In her ruling, AliKhan pointed to a “mountain of evidence” brought by the nonprofit coalition that showed “even the threat of a funding freeze was enough to send countless organizations into complete disarray.” Furthermore, she wrote that the Trump administration could not provide a “reasonable explanation for why they needed to freeze all federal financial assistance in less than a day to ‘safeguard valuable taxpayer resources.’”
But while turning off the flow of federal cash streams appeared to be “alarmingly easy” for Trump officials, AliKhan noted that turning them back on has “proven much more difficult.”
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