A United States district judge on Monday expanded a temporary injunction on President Donald Trump’s freeze of federal funding for aid programmes, citing potential “irreparable harm” to the plaintiffs, including the National Council of Nonprofits.
Judge Loren AliKhan’s ruling follows confusion sparked by the 78-year-old Republican president’s directive to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which sought to freeze trillions in loans and grants.
After widespread backlash, the OMB swiftly issued a notification rescinding the freeze, only to have White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt clarify that the freeze on spending itself remained intact.
The move created an uproar and OMB issued a terse notification saying the freezing of aid order had been “rescinded.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced soon afterwards, however, that the spending freeze remained in place — and only the memo from the budget office was rescinded, a move the judge described as “disingenuous.”
AliKhan blocked the spending freeze last week until the conclusion of a court hearing in Washington on Monday and she issued a ruling shortly afterwards extending the pause.
“The declarations and evidence presented by Plaintiffs paint a stark picture of nationwide panic in the wake of the funding freeze,” she wrote in a 30-page opinion.
“Organizations with every conceivable mission — healthcare, scientific research, emergency shelters, and more — were shut out of funding portals or denied critical resources beginning on January 28.”
The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Joe Biden, said as much as $3 trillion in financial assistance was implicated by the freeze, “a breathtakingly large sum of money to suspend practically overnight.”
OMB, she added, had “offered no rational explanation for why they needed to freeze all federal financial assistance with less than 24-hours’ notice.”
“If Defendants intend to conduct an exhaustive review of what programs should or should not be funded, such a review could be conducted without depriving millions of Americans access to vital resources,” she said.
“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.”
She also said the White House had overreached and “the appropriation of the government’s resources is reserved for Congress, not the Executive Branch.”
Many organizations are still waiting for funds to be disbursed, she said.
A district judge in Rhode Island last week also temporarily blocked the freeze on federal aid spending in a case brought by 22 states.
