Judge maintains block on Trump administration’s funding freeze

Washington — A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to temporarily stop its freeze on federal assistance, allowing aid to continue flowing to nonprofit organizations and other entities after the funding was targeted by the White House budget office last week.

U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan of the federal district court in Washington, D.C., formally granted the request from a coalition of nonprofits that had challenged the directive from the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB. She said the administration’s actions “run roughshod over a ‘bulwark of the Constitution’ by interfering with Congress’s appropriation of funds.”

Issued nearly one week ago, the OMB memo directed all agencies to temporarily pause all federal assistance that may be implicated by certain executive orders issued by President Trump in his first days in office.

While OMB acting Director Matthew Vaeth rescinded the memo after it led to widespread confusion as to which entities would be affected by the funding freeze, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the pause on federal assistance would remain in place and just the memo was being revoked.

In a 30-page opinion granting the challengers’ request to block the funding freeze, AliKhan wrote that a review of the programs that should or should not receive federal dollars “could be conducted without depriving millions of Americans access to vital resources.”

She notes that the administration’s memo potentially covered up to $3 trillion in financial assistance, a “breathtakingly large sum of money to suspend practically overnight.”

“Rather than taking a measured approach to identify purportedly wasteful spending, defendants cut the fuel supply to a vast, complicated, nationwide machine — seemingly without any consideration for the consequences of that decision,” AliKhan, who was nominated for her current seat by former President Biden in 2023, wrote. 

The judge also cited Leavitt’s statements, writing that “OMB and the various agencies it communicates with appear committed to restricting federal funding.”

“By rescinding the memorandum that announced the freeze, but ‘NOT . . . the federal funding freeze; itself, it appears that OMB sought to overcome a judicially imposed obstacle without actually ceasing the challenged conduct. The court can think of few things more disingenuous,” she wrote, quoting a social media post from the White House press secretary.

The initial memo from Vaeth brought on legal challenges from the nonprofit groups in Washington and from 22 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, which was filed in Rhode Island. The federal judge overseeing the states’ case temporarily blocked the Trump administration from freezing federal assistance Friday after concluding that OMB’s actions were likely unlawful. 

AliKhan’s decision came just before an earlier order that temporarily halted the freeze and maintained the status quo was set to expire at 5 p.m. Monday. She held a hearing earlier in the day to consider the request from the nonprofits to issue a temporary restraining order and suggested then that she would grant their motion.

AliKhan had warned that the harm to groups that receive federal assistance could be “catastrophic.”

The White House budget office’s directive targeting federal assistance is one of several measures taken by the new Trump administration that have upended the federal government. Mr. Trump has pledged to shrink the federal workforce and spending and tapped billionaire Elon Musk to oversee those efforts through the Department of Government Efficiency, which the president established on his first day back in the White House.

Since then, the Trump administration paused new funding for nearly all foreign aid and has targeted the U.S. Agency for International Development for a potential reorganization. 

The moves from the Trump administration pausing the flow of federal assistance have left organizations in the U.S. and abroad reeling. Domestically, groups that provide meals to the elderly and school-aged children, universities and small businesses were left scrambling to determine whether they would lose access to funding that has already been approved by Congress. Overseas, humanitarian and development groups that receive assistance from the State Department or USAID were forced to furlough workers.