With a nod to basic civics education, a district court judge issued a preliminary injunction on Thursday blocking the Trump administration from continuing to freeze the disbursement of funds for contracts, grants and financial assistance to states under an Office of Management and Budget memo first issued on Jan. 27 and since allegedly rescinded.
President Donald Trump improperly seized the power to direct government spending from Congress, District Court Judge John McConnell wrote in his opinion. He declared the president in violation of the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to actually disperse money allocated by Congress, and numerous other laws.
“Here, the Executive put itself above Congress,” McConnell wrote.
The decision comes in a case brought by a number of Democratic-controlled states against the Trump administration for blocking their access to funds appropriated by Congress through the OMB memo and a series of executive orders that the memo referenced. McConnell’s opinion applies to the funding withheld from these states. This is separate from the case involving funds frozen by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The president “imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending,” McConnell wrote, noting that the administration “has not pointed to any constitutional or statutory authority that would allow them to impose this type of categorical freeze.”
“The Executive’s categorical freeze of appropriated and obligated funds fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government,” McConnell wrote. “The interaction of the three co-equal branches of government is an intricate, delicate, and sophisticated balance — but it is crucial to our form of constitutional governance.”
The government-wide funding freeze began when OMB issued a memo on Jan. 27 ordering the disbursement for all contracts, grants and financial assistance to halt in order to review all of it for compliance with Trump’s executive orders purporting to prohibit funding for certain clean energy programs, diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, the recognition of transgender people, aiding undocumented immigrants and all foreign aid.
This memo initiated a period of total chaos where funding from the government stopped on a dime nationwide. Nonprofits providing essential services to the poor, disabled, children, homeless and more suddenly could notdraw down funds from government payment portals, which were no longer working.
In the face of this chaos, another district court issued a temporary restraining order blocking the OMB memo from taking effect. McConnell would later issue a second temporary restraining order. The administration then purported to rescind the OMB memo, but claimed it did so only to evade the court’s decision. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted online on Jan. 29 that the administration was only rescinding the memo to “end any confusion created by the court’s injunction.”
“[T]he Defendants’ voluntary rescission of the OMB Directive was a clear effort to moot legal challenges to the federal funding freeze announced in the OMB Directive,” McConnell wrote in his opinion on Thursday.
The Trump administration tried to argue that the funding freeze was not a result of the OMB memo or the president’s executive orders but rather the independent decision-making of agency heads. McConnell rejected this.
“[T]he OMB Directive amounted to a command, not a suggestion, that Agency Defendants shall execute a categorical, indefinite funding freeze to align funding decisions with the President’s priorities,” McConnell wrote.
McConnell also rejected the idea put forward by the administration that the inclusion of the phrase “consistent with the law” meant that the order must be seen as lawful.
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“[T]he undisputed evidence before the Court is that adding the ‘consistent with the law’ caveat was nothing more than window dressing on an unconstitutional directive by the Executive,” McConnell wrote.
The decision prevents the Trump administration from reissuing or directing in any form the OMB memo or executive orders; pausing, freezing or otherwise withholding funds as ordered by the OMB memo or executives; and orders the administration to release all congressionally appropriated funds previously withheld from the states that filed suit.
This is the second preliminary injunction placed on Trump’s funding freeze. On Feb. 25, District Court Judge Lori AliKhan issued an injunction on behalf of a group of nonprofits whose funds were withheld under the OMB memo’s directive.