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Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Federal Funding Freeze Amid Mass Confusion

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California Attorney General Rob Bonta speaks at a news conference in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on Thursday, Nov. 7, 2024. On Tuesday, California and 22 states said they are suing the Trump administration over a sweeping budget directive freezing nearly all federal funding, calling the move illegal and sparking confusion about affected programs. (Terry Chea/AP Photo)

Updated 2:49 p.m. Tuesday

A federal judge in Washington on Tuesday temporarily halted a Trump administration directive that ordered a freeze on disbursements of nearly all federal funding.

The directive was challenged in court Tuesday by a group of states, including California — as well as in a separate lawsuit brought by nonprofits that receive funding from the federal government. It was the case brought by nonprofits that resulted in the temporary halt to the funding freeze just minutes before it was set to take effect at 2 p.m. Pacific. The judge ruled that it would be paused until Monday afternoon, when another hearing is scheduled.

In an interview, California Attorney General Rob Bonta slammed the directive, saying it “puts at risk a lot of very important, essential, critical social safety net services,” including health care, food assistance, housing programs and emergency funding for recovery from the Los Angeles fires.

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The wide-ranging directive, issued late Monday by the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, caused immediate confusion throughout the nation about which programs would and would not be affected.

Despite insistence from the White House that the move would not restrict funds directly provided to individuals, Democratic officials said Tuesday that they were receiving reports that state portals for federally funded programs, including Medicaid, were not working. That was true briefly in California, Bonta said — but he added that the portal was reopened within hours “perhaps after the outcry and political blowback.”

U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 20, 2025. (Jim Watson/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

The lawsuit filed by the states challenges President Trump’s power to restrict funding already appropriated by Congress, the group of Democratic attorneys general said. In announcing the suit, they said Trump’s move threatens funding covering disaster relief, law enforcement grants, infrastructure projects, nutrition assistance, child care and more.

“We will not stand by while the president attempts to disrupt vital programs that feed our kids, provide medical care to our families and support housing in our communities. We won’t stand by while the president breaks the law and oversteps his authority,” Bonta said.

“It is reckless. It is dangerous, unprecedented in scope and devastating in its attendant effect. It’s thrown state programs into chaos and created confusion among our residents,” he added.

The Trump administration insisted that the order is simply aimed at ensuring that federal spending aligns with the new president’s priorities and is not going to what White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called “illegal DEI programs … transgenderism and wokeness across our federal bureaucracy and agencies.”

“This is not a blanket pause on federal assistance and grant programs from the Trump administration. Individual assistance that includes — I’m not naming everything that’s included, but just to give you a few examples: Social Security benefits, Medicare benefits, food stamps, welfare benefits, assistance that is going directly to individuals will not be impacted by this pause,” Leavitt said at a briefing Wednesday.

While the Trump administration blamed the media for confusion over what funding the directive will affect, Bonta said he believes the ambiguity in the memo was intentional — both to test the bounds of the law and to confuse and scare federal officials.

“It’s very broad, and it’s very expansive. It’s very ambiguous and imprecise,” he said. “They could have enumerated with great precision everything that it included and everything that it didn’t. Instead, they wanted to play politics, and they used a bunch of buzzwords that mean different things to different people. Like what’s wokeism?”

Bonta said that if the directive is allowed to stand, it could result in states facing immediate cash shortfalls — something that could have particularly “devastating” impacts in California, where the state is working to respond to the recent Los Angeles wildfires. Bonta said he believes the state’s FEMA funding would be at risk.

Other Democratic lawmakers also reacted in anger. California Sen. Alex Padilla called on Republican senators to halt the confirmation process of the man tapped to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, until Trump “reverses this reckless order.”

“Donald Trump is illegally blocking hundreds of billions of dollars for essential federal programs … all in his effort to pay for his tax cuts for large corporations and billionaires, like the ones he surrounded himself with during his inauguration,” Padilla said. “This overreach is unconstitutional and hurts the thousands of Californians who have been devastated by the recent fires. When Congress approves federal funds for programs to help communities, they are not optional; they are legal mandates.”

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