A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to keep taxpayer dollars flowing to 22 Democratic-leaning states for all congressionally approved government programs, including those that could run afoul of President Trump’s ideological tests.
The decision, signed by Judge John J. McConnell Jr., is a temporary but significant victory for the Democratic attorneys general from those states and the District of Columbia, who sued the administration in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. The order applies only to the states that filed the lawsuit.
It requires the administration not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” taxpayer money already allocated by Congress.
The 13-page order, for which Judge McConnell did not specify an expiration date, adds an obstacle to Mr. Trump’s plans to aggressively reshape the government around his own agenda; a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued an earlier administrative stay on Tuesday blocking the initial order from the White House Office of Management and Budget to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal money while the review for ideological compliance continued. That stay was set to expire on Monday.
The Trump administration has sent conflicting signals about the freeze, rescinding the memo that ordered it but signaling that the review of the ideological tilt of previously funded federal programs would continue.
“This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Wednesday, in a social-media post that was introduced as evidence in the lawsuit. She added that the president’s executive orders “on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”
Judge McConnell’s order countermanded that claim, calling out Ms. Leavitt’s statement and requiring the Trump administration not to reintroduce the freeze “under any other name or title.”
The freeze, however brief, caused chaos. State governments were abruptly locked out of portals that reimbursed them for basic services like Medicaid, housing subsidies and school lunches.
The White House withdrew the order in the face of legal challenges and public backlash, but the fight is just beginning over how much authority Mr. Trump can exercise over spending in his efforts to implement his agenda.
Judge McConnell’s Friday order does not block the Trump administration from continuing its review, only from defunding those programs that fail its tests in the states that sued — New York, California, Illinois, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin, along with the District of Columbia.
In that sense, it may create a divide between Democratic states that will continue to have funds flowing and Republican states that will still face uncertainty.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Rob Bonta, attorney general for California, said in a statement that he was “grateful for the court’s decision.” He accused the Trump administration of “intentionally creating chaos” and “attempting to sow fear and confusion in our communities.”
The series of executive orders mandating reviews of existing programs are still in force. The litmus tests range from the specific, such as ending assistance to sanctuary cities that decline to help with immigration enforcement and rescinding subsidies for electric vehicles, to the opaque, such as defunding “DEI infiltration,” “environmental justice” and schools that teach “subversive, harmful, and false ideologies.”
The Supreme Court already answered the question of whether the president can withhold congressionally allocated money in 1975, said David A. Super, a professor at Georgetown Law. That was when the court found that President Richard Nixon could not direct the Environmental Protection Agency to withhold money allocated to cities for sewers and sewage treatment under the Federal Water Pollution Control Act.
“The Supreme Court unanimously held that the president has no inherent authority to withhold the money,” he said.
But the current court has shown deference to presidential authority and a willingness to overturn its own precedent.
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