Department of Justice lawyers filed an appeal hours after a judge ordered payments for federal programs to resume.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Feb. 10 appealed a federal judge’s order to immediately restore and resume payments for federal programs, just hours after the ruling was issued.
The
notice, filed in a Rhode Island court by DOJ lawyer Daniel Schwei, came after U.S. District Judge John McConnell
ruled on Monday that President Donald Trump’s administration had
failed to fully abide by an earlier order directing the government to unfreeze all federal funding for programs authorized by Congress.
That earlier order was handed down by McConnell in January in response to a
directive issued that same month by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) calling for a freeze of grants, loans, and other financial assistance for thousands of federal programs, pending review by the administration.
A memo, authored by OMB Acting Director Matthew Vaeth, directed federal agencies to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of all financial assistance programs to determine whether spending on the programs was aligned with Trump’s agenda and priorities.
“In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to 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 Jan. 27
memo stated.
Vaeth did not specify when the pause on funding for the programs would be lifted.
The Trump administration was challenged in court by advocacy groups as well as a coalition of state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
They said in their
lawsuit that “the Executive’s actions by the Office of Management and Budget ... violate the Administrative Procedure Act because Congress has not delegated any unilateral authority to the Executive to indefinitely pause all federal financial assistance without considering the statutory and contractual terms governing these billions of dollars of grants.”
They also said the freeze violated the Spending Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The White House later rescinded the memo after McConnell blocked the plan in response to the lawsuit.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt
said in a Jan. 29 statement on social media platform X that the memo had been withdrawn “to end any confusion created by the court’s injunction.”
However, Leavitt said, “The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”
The attorneys general later
argued that the Trump administration was not complying with the judge’s initial order to unfreeze the funding, citing alleged “evidence of ongoing disruptions impacting disbursements to states.”
In his new order on Monday, McConnell told the Trump administration to immediately restore the frozen federal funding until he decides on the preliminary injunction request.
“The States have presented evidence in this motion that the Defendants in some cases have continued to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds,” the judge wrote.
McConnell added that administration officials said “that they are just trying to root out fraud” but that the freezes in effect now “were a result of the broad categorical order, not a specific finding of possible fraud.”
The broad freeze, the judge said, was “likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country.”
The Epoch Times has contacted the Department of Justice for further comment.
Aldgra Fredly and Jacob Burg contributed to this report.
