A photo shows Donald Trump presenting 7th U.S. Circuit Court Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his pick for the Supreme Court in the Rose Garden at the White House on September 26, 2020 in Washington, DC (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images).
In Washington, D.C., a federal judge temporarily stopped President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal aid programs just moments before it was scheduled to go into effect.
The judge behind the decision, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan, an appointee of Joe Biden, used a recent opinion from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, one of Trump’s own Supreme Court selections, to justify temporarily halting the funding freeze.
The five-page order came in response to a lawsuit against the week-old Trump administration by the National Council of Nonprofits (NCN), the largest network of nonprofit organizations in North America. It has more than 30,000 organizational members and other groups, including SAGE, which describes itself as the country’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of elderly LGBTQ+ people.
The complaint names the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which is part of the Executive Office of the President and is responsible for overseeing the management of federal financial assistance, and its Acting Director, Matthew Vaeth, as defendants.
The action targets a memorandum issued by Vaeth directing federal agencies to “complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders.” In doing so, those agencies were directed to “temporarily pause all activities related to the obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
The plaintiffs sought a temporary restraining order, which requires showing a “substantial likelihood of success on the merits,” to stop the administration from putting the policy into effect.
Instead of granting the plaintiff’s request, AliKhan chose a different and less intrusive means to at least push back the effective date of the more complex aspects of policy until the court had more information from both sides.
“Given the weighty legal issues in this case, and to properly evaluate the merits of Plaintiffs’ motion, the court will require full briefing from the parties and a motions hearing,” she wrote in a five-page order.
AliKhan then cited to March 2024 concurrence penned by Barrett to justify her decision to issue the short-term administrative stay.
“While the court awaits full briefing and argument, it may issue a brief ‘administrative stay,”” AliKhan wrote, quoting Barrett. “An administrative stay ‘buys the court time to deliberate’ when issues are not ‘easy to evaluate in haste.’ An ‘administrative stay does not typically reflect the court’s consideration of the merits,’ but instead ‘reflects a first-blush judgment about the relative consequences’ of the case. Such a stay ‘freeze[s] legal proceedings until the court can rule on a party’s request for expedited relief.’”
AliKhan’s order will last until Feb. 3, at 5 p.m., meaning no federal funds can be suspended until then.
Plaintiffs in the complaint argued that the Trump administration’s policy is “devoid of any legal basis or the barest rationale” and “will have a devastating impact on hundreds of thousands of grant recipients who depend on the inflow of grant money (money already obligated and already awarded) to fulfill their missions, pay their employees, pay their rent — and, indeed, improve the day-to-day lives of the many people they work so hard to serve.”
Although the Trump Administration is at liberty to “advanc[e] [its] priorities,” it must do so within the confines of the law, the complaint said.
“It has not,” the complaint continues. “The Memo fails to explain the source of OMB’s purported legal authority to gut every grant program in the federal government; it fails to consider the reliance interest of the many grant recipients, including those to whom money had already been promised; and it announces a policy of targeting grant recipients based in part on those recipients’ First Amendment rights and with no bearing on the recipients’ eligibility to receive federal funds.”
