“This is a level of chaos I have never seen in my career,” said Salena Copeland, executive director of the Legal Aid Association of Califonia.
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday temporarily blocked a Trump administrative directive freezing grant funding for a myriad of programs, including legal aid.
U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan, acting on a petition from a coalition of nonprofits, issued an administrative stay just minutes before the “pause” on new allocations was set to begin. The judge ordered additional briefing and set a hearing for Monday.
The stay followed an announcement by 23 state attorneys general on Tuesday that they would seek an immediate injunction to stop the Trump administration from freezing federal grant funding.
In a virtual press conference, Democratic attorneys general accused Trump and his Office of Management and Budget of violating the Constitution with a Monday night memo “pausing” trillions of dollars previously allocated by Congress for Medicaid, foreign aid, child care and education.
“Not only does this administration’s new policy put people at risk, but it is plainly unconstitutional,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “The president does not get to decide which laws to enforce and for whom. When Congress dedicates funding for program, the president cannot pull that funding on a whim.”
In California, state officials, university leaders and nonprofits were scrambling Tuesday morning to understand what federal dollars may no longer be available and how they might possibly be restored. Attorney General Rob Bonta said he believed disaster aid for the recent Los Angeles County wildfires is at risk.
“This directive from OMB is unlawful,” Bonta said. “It violates the U.S. Constitution. It violates the Administrative Procedure Act, not to mention that it’s arbitrary and capricious. The federal government should have to follow the rules, follow the process that’s laid out by the law, the same as any of us.”
House Republicans largely defended the OMB funding freeze. Appropriations Committee Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma told CNN correspondent Manu Raju that while “lawyers disagree,” he believes Congress-approved spending “is not a law” but a “directive” that the president can reject through “executive oversight.”
Salena Copeland, executive director of the Legal Aid Association of California, said nonprofits around the state were “all trying to figure out the impacts to programs” created by the two-page OMB directive that left recipients with many questions.
“Organizations do not yet know what the process will look like to get those funds ‘unfrozen,’ and, in the meantime, nonprofits and schools will have to figure out if they can continue to provide services with other funding or by cutting other programs,” Copeland said. “This is a level of chaos I have never seen in my career.”
Diego Cartagena, president and CEO of legal aid organization Bet Tzedek, said a “sense of overwhelming chaos and panic and concern” started Monday night when nonprofit leaders began circulating emails about the order. Since then, he said, Bet Tzedek officials have been trying to calculate just what might be lost if the federal funding freeze holds, what philanthropic options might be available and, ultimately, what services might have to be cut.
“Some of these grants are in the millions of dollars for us,” Cartagena said. Bet Tzedek is fortunate to have an endowment and reserves to pay immediate bills, he added, “but that will only last us so long before we have to start making difficult decisions.”
Law school representatives said they were hopeful that student aid was not included in the order but were still waiting for clarification. California’s Judicial Council, which receives federal funding for family law programs, was studying the directive for possible impacts as well, its spokesman said.
The state attorneys general filed the request for a temporary restraining order Tuesday afternoon in the U.S. District Court for Rhode Island. The suit marks the second legal challenge in two weeks brought by Democrats seeking to block Trump orders.
A federal judge in Seattle last week granted a temporary restraining order freezing an executive order that would end birthright citizenship.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. This story has been updated to note a federal court’s temporary stay of the OMB directive, to include comments from Diego Cartagena, president and CEO of Bet Tzedek, and to add the AG’s filing in the Rhode Island federal court Tuesday afternoon.
