A federal judge extended the block on the White House budget office’s attempts to pause federal grants and loan disbursements on Feb. 3. The judge instated an order against the White House budget office preventing them from beginning the pause.
Judge Loren L. AliKhan authored a 30-page opinion which entailed her decision. In it she included the reasoning which brought her to her decision.
“[The White House budget office’s] actions in this case potentially run roughshod over a ‘bulwark of the Constitution’ by interfering with Congress’s appropriation of federal funds,” AliKhan said. “Because the funding freeze threatens the lifeline that keeps countless organizations operational, plaintiffs have met their burden of showing irreparable harm.”
The White House budget office initially sent out a memo announcing the freeze to all federal aid on Jan. 28, which caused confusion across the country as the scale of the freeze was unclear. It was later clarified by the Department of Education that Pell grants and individual student loan disbursements would not be affected. AliKhan temporarily blocked the freeze from going through later that day, with her being set to come to a decision the following Monday.
This order comes on top of a similar order from Judge John J. McConnell Jr., which he instated on Jan. 31. McConnell ordered the Trump administration to continue sending federal aid to 22 states, including Connecticut, that filed suit against the administration over the potential freeze. On Feb. 3, the federal government announced that they had interpreted this order as applying nationally, instead of exclusively to the states involved in the suit.
McConnell’s order discussed the reason for it blocking the federal government from instating the pause.
“Are there some aspects of the pause that might be legal and appropriate constitutionally for the Executive to take? The Court imagines there are, but it is equally sure that there are many instances in the Executive Orders’ wide-ranging, all-encompassing, and ambiguous “pause” of critical funding that are not,” McConnell wrote in his 13-page order. “The Court must act in these early stages of the litigation under the ‘worst case scenario’ because the breadth and ambiguity of the Executive’s action makes it impossible to do otherwise.”
In their respective orders, both AliKhan and McConnell identified their decisions as being temporary. Neither order specified how long they would be in effect for. While these orders are in place, the federal government will be barred from freezing federal grants and loan disbursements.