FEMA Has Paid $2 Billion to Comply With Order Barring Funding Freeze: Government

A judge had blocked the government from freezing federal financial assistance.

The headquarters of FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) in Washington in an undated file image. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has paid more than $2.2 billion to states in recent weeks, bringing it into compliance with a court order, the government told a federal judge in a new filing.

“Defendants respectfully submit that they have fully complied with the Court’s Order. Defendants respectfully request that the Court notify Defendants if they have misunderstood the intended scope of the Court’s Order,” lawyers for the Department of Justice told U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. in an April 24 document.

The payments include millions of dollars sent to states to fund efforts to clean up after storms, according to an exhibit that accompanied the filing.

McConnell in January temporarily blocked the government from pausing or canceling grants to Washington and 23 states, including Arizona and New York. In March, he extended the block by entering a preliminary injunction.

The judge ruled on April 4 that FEMA was violating his order by withholding grants from states.

FEMA had implemented a manual review process that resulted in the states not being paid, according to court filings. The process “essentially imposes an indefinite categorical pause on payments,” McConnell wrote at the time.

He ordered FEMA to stop the process and immediately comply with his most recent ruling.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which is led by Secretary Kristi Noem, told The Epoch Times in an email after the ruling was handed down that “at the direction of Secretary Noem, FEMA has implemented additional controls to ensure that all grant program activity is consistent with law and does not promote fraud, waste or abuse, as it has in the past.”

The official said, “We will continue to ensure that U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used wisely and for mission critical efforts.”

Government lawyers said on Thursday that FEMA was already working to process the payments while at the same time seeking to implement the manual review process. “Given that FEMA was already working to process the Plaintiff States’ payment requests prior to the Court’s Order, Defendants do not concede that the Court’s Order ‘effected’ any specific subsequent payments,” they wrote.

The funding freeze was ordered by President Donald Trump shortly after he took office and was outlined in a memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget.

That office later rescinded its memo, but McConnell said in one of his rulings that the withdrawal was “in name-only” and that “the substantive effect of the directive carries on.”