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Friday, February 21, 2025

Legal battle over Trump’s federal funding freeze is just beginning

by

22 days ago
20250129
People follow a virtual speech of U.S. president Donald Trump at the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

People follow a virtual speech of U.S. president Donald Trump at the Annual Meeting of World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Markus Schreiber

The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s push for a sweep­ing pause on fed­er­al grants and loans to­tal­ing po­ten­tial­ly tril­lions of dol­lars is on hold for now, on the or­der of a fed­er­al judge.

But the le­gal bat­tle over the plan that set off pan­ic and con­fu­sion across the coun­try is just be­gin­ning, and it could be­come a con­sti­tu­tion­al clash over con­trol of tax­pay­er mon­ey and ex­pan­sion of ex­ec­u­tive pow­er be­fore the Supreme Court.

Here’s a look at the le­gal is­sues at play:

The pow­er of the purse

The Con­sti­tu­tion gives Con­gress con­trol over fed­er­al spend­ing, a set­up key to the framers’ vi­sion of sep­a­rat­ing ma­jor pow­ers be­tween branch­es of gov­ern­ment.

Once ap­pro­pri­a­tions are ap­proved, the White House has the job of dol­ing out mon­ey to states, agen­cies and non­prof­its through the Of­fice of Man­age­ment and Bud­get.

Typ­i­cal­ly, the White House sends out mon­ey ac­cord­ing to the pri­or­i­ties laid out in Con­gress, though there have been times when pres­i­dents have re­fused to spend all the cash they get. Thomas Jef­fer­son, for ex­am­ple, de­clined to use mon­ey set aside for gun­boats in the ear­ly 1800s.

When the pres­i­dent won’t spend mon­ey that Con­gress has set aside, it’s called im­pound­ment.

Trump’s Re­pub­li­can ad­min­is­tra­tion has framed the halt to fed­er­al grants and loans as a brief pause that would al­low for an across-the-board re­view to align spend­ing with his ide­o­log­i­cal agen­da, rather than an im­pound­ment.

What does the law say?

A show­down be­tween Con­gress and Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon in the 1970s led to a law lay­ing out spe­cif­ic rules around im­pound­ment.

Nixon had tried to halt bil­lions of dol­lars in fed­er­al fund­ing for things rang­ing from so­cial pro­grams to wa­ter treat­ment. The ad­min­is­tra­tion faced a wave of law­suits that it over­whelm­ing­ly lost, said William Ford, a pol­i­cy an­a­lyst at the non­par­ti­san group Pro­tect Democ­ra­cy.

Con­gress al­so passed the Im­pound­ment Con­trol Act in re­sponse. The act says that if there’s a de­lay in send­ing out fed­er­al mon­ey, the White House is sup­posed to tell Con­gress about the pause and how much mon­ey is in­volved. There are some ex­cep­tions for lo­gis­ti­cal is­sues re­lat­ed to spe­cif­ic pro­grams.

The law al­so says any longer-term freeze has to get con­gres­sion­al ap­proval. While du­els over­spend­ing have con­tin­ued since then, the law has rarely been in­voked, Ford said.

The is­sue could head to the Supreme Court

Trump al­lies have said that the Im­pound­ment Con­trol Act is un­con­sti­tu­tion­al, ar­gu­ing the White House should have more con­trol over spend­ing. Trump promised to chal­lenge the law in a 2023 cam­paign video.

The clash could end with the ad­min­is­tra­tion pur­su­ing spe­cif­ic fund­ing cuts, or it could end up chal­leng­ing be­fore the con­ser­v­a­tive-ma­jor­i­ty Supreme Court, said John Yoo, a Berke­ley Law pro­fes­sor who served in the George W. Bush ad­min­is­tra­tion.

The jus­tices weighed in on the Nixon fund­ing fight in a case known as Train v. New York. The court unan­i­mous­ly found that the pres­i­dent couldn’t block sewage treat­ment fund­ing that had al­ready been ap­proved by Con­gress.

What else might hap­pen next?

The White House has said that the fund­ing freeze wouldn’t af­fect pro­grams that send mon­ey to in­di­vid­ual peo­ple, like So­cial Se­cu­ri­ty, Medicare, food stamps, stu­dent loans and schol­ar­ships.

It could still af­fect tril­lions of dol­lars and cause wide­spread dis­rup­tion in a wide range of pro­grams, from the Na­tion­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion to Meals on Wheels.

It’s al­so set off at least two law­suits, one helmed by the group Democ­ra­cy For­ward rep­re­sent­ing non­prof­its that get fed­er­al fund­ing and an­oth­er from near­ly two dozen De­mo­c­ra­t­ic states.

They say the pause is clear­ly un­con­sti­tu­tion­al and breaks fed­er­al con­tract­ing law. The non­prof­its say ide­o­log­i­cal bent of the pro­posed re­view al­so vi­o­lates their free­dom of speech.

The tem­po­rary stay is­sued by U.S. Dis­trict Judge Loren L. AliKhan in Wash­ing­ton lasts un­til Feb. 3, when she’ll con­sid­er whether to ex­tend the block or let the plan go for­ward.

By LIND­SAY WHITE­HURST

WASH­ING­TON (AP)


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