Court Enters Preliminary Injunction to Bar ‘Categorical Freeze’ on Grants, Contracts
The Executive Branch “imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending.”
The United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island entered a preliminary injunction placing a “categorical freeze” on federal grants and contracts.
Categorical freeze is the main point.
Numerous states sued Trump’s administration over a memo from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) titled “Temporary Pause of Agency Grant, Loan, and Other Financial Assistance Programs.”
The OMB told agencies and departments to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance.”
Chief Judge John J. McConnell wrote that the Executive Branch “put itself above Congress” when it “imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending.”
In government, “categorical” money is money given to states and local governments by the local government, with strict rules on how those officials can spend it.
Therefore, the ruling is narrow, only applying to funding anything under the categorical category.
The House controls the purse. Agencies and departments can spend or suspend money “based only on the power Congress has given to them.” McConnell continued (emphasis mine):
The Executive has not pointed to any constitutional or statutory authority that would allow them to impose this type of categorical freeze. The Court is not limiting the Executive’s discretion or micromanaging the administration of federal funds. Rather, consistent with the Constitution, statutes, and caselaw, the Court is simply holding that the Executive’s discretion to impose its own policy preferences on appropriated funds can be exercised only if it is authorized by the congressionally approved appropriations statutes.
McConnell noted the many statutes that assert Congress’s power over spending, including the Antideficiency Act and Impoundment Control Act (ICA).
“The ICA provides the only legal mechanism for the President to delay or withhold funding, not cancel it,” according to the Government Accountability Office. “This law requires that the President notify Congress before delaying or withholding funds. That notification is called a ‘special message’ and must contain information such as the reason for the impoundment along with the estimated fiscal, economic, and budgetary effects.”
Trump has not sent a message to Congress about why the branch should “impound” those appropriated funds.
McConnell’s preliminary injunction means the defendants cannot impede “the disbursement of appropriated federal funds to States under awarded grants, executed contracts, or other executed financial obligations.”
That is the only money affected by this preliminary injunction.
4/ So Trump Administration would remain free to cancel grants/contracts based on change in policy where they do it based on individual grants. Court also denied stay pending appeal. I don't see this injunction tying Trump's hands b/c of its limit to "categorical" freezes.
— Margot Cleveland (@ProfMJCleveland) March 6, 2025
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Comments
Doesn’t spend the funds, they allocate them. This judge is a retard
That should read Congress doesn’t spend the funds.
Agreed. Congress “controls the purse strings” (under Article I) to prevent the spending of money that hasn’t been allocated. Once allocated, authority over its spending becomes an executive matter under Article II. Having the power to authorize spending isn’t the same as being able to require the actual spending of the funds.
Let’s look at the converse to see how stupid this is:
Imagine Congress refusing to allocate money to one of the POTUS’ pet programs. Could the POTUS go to the courts, asking them to order Congress to allocate the funds? Of course not! The idea is nonsense. The authority to allocate funds and the authority to spend them were separated by the authors of the Constitution. Another “check and balance,” this one giving the POTUS a negative on spending when he considers it wasteful, unnecessary, or otherwise not serving the public’s and the country’s interests!
That’s not true. Impoundment is illegal. The president can’t just decide not to spend money that Congress has appropriated. But (absent an injunction) he generally has the whole year in which to spend it, and also Congress doesn’t usually say exactly who should get the money, or how much each should get, so the president’s people decide that.
And yet when Biden stopped the construction of the wall that Congress had explicitly assigned funds to do…. You said nothing… guess it’s (D)ifferent when you libs do it huh
Btw DaveGinoly knows what he’s talking about… you do not… you should quietly try to learn from him
Who said it’s illegal? Congress? The courts? Certainly not the Constitution. The Constitution allows Congress to determine how much money can be spent for any particular program or project. But neither the Congress nor the courts can tell a POTUS that he must spend the money. Allocation is a Congressional function, spending is an Executive function.
I’d wager you can point statutes and/or court decisions that support your position. But, as I’ve mentioned to you before, I argue from principle. In principle, spending is an executive function. Congress holds sway over the Executive only insofar as it can limit the amount of money that’s available and to allocate that money to specific purposes. This restraint on the Executive is within the authority of Congress per the Constitution. It allows Congress to limit the spending of the Executive and to direct funds to Congressionally-approved programs and projects (as Congress deigned to fund USAID for JFK). Likewise, the POTUS also can limit Congress’ spending by refusing to spend allocated funds. (“Allocation” is only authorization to spend. It does not imply a requirement to spend the allocated funds. Government agencies rush at the end of a fiscal year to spend funds that were allocated that haven’t yet been spent. They are not always successful. They want to spend the money to protect future allocations, but nothing in the laws of most – any? – states requires the spending of all allocated funds. Note this occurs with federal grants being spent within the States. It’s rare to not try to spend down the fund, but is it illegal to decide to not do so? I don’t believe it is.) The duly-elected POTUS can decide to not fund programs that are anathema to his agenda. The people elected the POTUS to advance his agenda and to exercise his judgment while so doing. (This is called “democracy.”) Attempting to control whether or not the Executive spends the allocated funds would be a violation of the separation of powers, just as much as if the Executive attempted to use the courts to force Congress to allocate more money.
The nearest I can see to control over funds is found in Article I:
“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law…”
This is a restraint on the Executive, limiting the funds available to it. I don’t see anything in the Constitution that imposes a requirement to spend allocated funds (or to draw them from the Treasury, as it is styled in the Constitution), nor do I see anything giving Congress a say in whether or not the Executive spends the money.
I’d be happy to entertain suggestions of where such authority might be found in the Constitution. If it’s not there, it’s made up BS that should be challenged.
“Revolutionary arguments surface even when long standing practices appear to have firm judicial support.”
Ren Jander, JD
Writing in https://www.thepostemail.com/2020/11/18/elections-undecided-by-midnight-are-void-9-0-decision/
11.18.2020
And case lies again, as usual.
To caseoftheblues:
I’m flattered, but Milhouse deserves recognition for his contributions to this site. He is almost always correct, but sometimes he’s right for the wrong reasons. By “wrong reasons” I mean he can site decisions and statute until the cows come home, but I believe many of those statutes and decisions violate general principles of limited government and freedom, and sometimes they are offensive to the Constitution itself. This is not Milhouse’s fault. He’s often just stating the situation as it is. I favor challenging the status quo when it seems injurious to our liberty and offensive to the Constitution. I don’t argue against Milhouse, I argue against the “authorities” he cites.
In doing a bit of reading it appears the President used to have the ability to
impound funds. Congress thought Nixon abused it and passed an act to nerf it. I don’t understand how Congress can abrogate the constitution in this fashion.
I’m sure our resident constitutional scholar will weigh in on this.
I’ll also point out the Biden withheld arms to Israel that had been approved by Congress. How is this any different?
1. As I understand it the president never had the authority to impound funds, Nixon just did it without any authority, which is why Congress passed a law to stop him.
2. Usually foreign policy (as opposed to foreign aid) appropriations have language authorizing the president to delay or withhold if he thinks it appropriate. Obviously any money appropriated under an act with such language would not be subject to this injunction.
Article in favor of impoundment in constitution and declaring Impoundment Control Act to be constitutional.
https://americarenewing.com/the-presidents-constitutional-power-of-impoundment/#:~:text=Impoundment%20is%20simply%20another%20word%20for%20the%20President%E2%80%99s,measures%20enacted%20by%20Congress%20in%20a%20responsible%20manner.
Correction: Article claims ICA is unconstitutional.
I thought so. It was almost a certainty that this authority was made up by Congress. If they had the authority (in the Constitution) to force the POTUS to spend allocated funds, they would have pointed to it and would have attempted to enforce it. But they had no such authority, so they made it up. As I say in another post here, it’s “made up BS.”
Allocation is a Congressional function
Spending is an Executive function
The Executive can’t force the Congress to allocate
Congress can’t force the Executive to spend
This is not rocket science.
Neither has any authority to break into the authority wielded by the other, except where the Constitution makes exceptions to this rule.
Courts do not get to decide budget issues. They also do not get to control other branches of government.
Explain that to them. I don’t think they’ve heard it before.
Courts get to decide questions of law. If a question of law happens to come up in a budget process, then it is the courts’ job to decide it.
And yes, the courts do get to control the executive by issuing writs. Only a moron would deny that, since if they couldn’t then writs would be meaningless. The constitution explicitly enshrines the writ of habeas corpus; according to you the Great Writ is and has always been invalid, a usurpation of executive authority, because who gave a court the right to order the king to yield up a prisoner?
Testing
No, the authority to issue habeas does not create a presumption that the executive can be controlled via writs. It makes an exception to the rule that it can’t be controlled by them. It’s an exception to the general rule that each of the three branches of government has no authority over the other two. Exceptions to this rule (such as Congress’ authority to withhold its consent for appointments to certain offices) are found in the Constitution. Neither Congress nor the courts are authorized to manufacture new ways in which to interfere with the Executive.
I’m sure there are other exceptions to the rule, but authorizing funds and spending them are functions split between Congress and the Executive, respectively. If the POTUS asks a court to order Congress to allocate funds, the court would overstep its authority to issue such an order. Congress has the sole authority to determine if money can be spent. Likewise, if Congress asks a court to require the POTUS to spend money, a court would similarly overstep its authority if it should comply. The POTUS has sole authority to determine if money should be spent (spending money for the operation of executive departments, agencies, and offices is an executive function). The Constitution has many “checks” to prevent government action, the POTUS is the final check to assure money is not spent wastefully (in any manner).
I should add that a court can command the Executive, but only when the Executive oversteps its constitutional authority. So long as the Executive remains within its constitutional authority, there’s nothing that either of the other two branches can do.
Effectively, the court can’t compel the POTUS to obey an order. As I’ve written elsewhere, the POTUS takes an oath to support and defend the Constitution too. As an independent moral agent, he gets to decide whether or not the order would prevent him from honoring his oath. The court can provide the POTUS with its opinion on the matter, but it’s up to the POTUS to determine the value of that opinion. (A tip o’ the hat to henrybowman and Andrew Jackson!)
The Andrew Jackson quote never happened. It was made up by a Jackson opponent, many years later.
Is there any insight about how SCOTUS would react to ignoring these orders outright, would it be the same as the most recent decision, setting a nasty precedent?
Years ago there was a SNAFU at Hopkins where a test subject died. A person at Hopkins got into a pissing match with the Human Subjects office at NIH, who promptly froze funding disbursements. Institutions don’t get lump sum funds for grants except for capital purchases. Lots of peeps didn’t get pay checks that Friday. Not sure if other institutions were involved as I was gone by then and had no dog in the fight. So there is precedent to stuff being stopped STAT. FWIW, Hopkins gets as much federal $$ as Harvard and MIT combined.
I am surprised that Bloomberg hasn’t weighed into this after buying a School of Public Health who probably has a large number of bizarro grants. Maybe he understands that not being seen at the present time is a good syrategy.
If some parties think they are owed monies on executed contracts they should file actions in the court of claims. I’m not sure what’s going on here. It appears that the federal district courts are expanding their jurisdiction to transform themselves into some sort of standing committee of oversight to micro-manage the executive. This is essentially a judicial coup.
Congress may allocate funds, but the President should be under no obligation to spend them all; exhibit the border wall under Biden.
It should be simple:
Congress determines if money can be spent
The POTUS decides if money should be spent
Where Congress has authorized spending for a specific ‘thing’ and allocated funding for that specific ‘thing’ then the Executive gotta spend the $ on that ‘thing’. DoD says we need 100 aircraft of this type for.this purpose and Congress authorizes DoD to make the purchase then allocates $ to buy the aircraft. Oversimplified but that is how the system is supposed to function.
What often happens is the Congress appropriates $ for broad goals/purposes and leaves the details up to the Executive which in recent decades has been the bureaucracy rewarding ideological allies. See.the NGO of Stacy Abrams getting set up and then handed $2 billion. This is not how it is supposed to function and IMO the Executive not only may but should act to rein in waste on this type of spending. ID it, pause it, send Congress a list of 5W and let them decide to specifically authorize this spending or not with an on the record vote.
“Where Congress has authorized spending for a specific ‘thing’ and allocated funding for that specific ‘thing’ then the Executive gotta spend the $ on that ‘thing’. DoD says we need 100 aircraft of this type for.this purpose and Congress authorizes DoD to make the purchase then allocates $ to buy the aircraft.”
Yes, the Congress determines if money can be spent and allocates the funds for a purpose. But that could only mean that the POTUS can’t spend the money on anything else. It does not necessarily mean that the POTUS is required to spend it. See my “simple” statement, above. The POTUS is elected, in part, to exercise his judgment concerning all matters executive. The spending money allocated for executive matters is an executive function.
Kinda. As a general rule under the circumstances I laid out with both a specific authorization and a.specific appropriation then yes it does mean that the Executive must spend the $ appropriated on the specific authorization. We don’t elect a king, we elect a President to Execute the decisions of Congress (the People) and with limited exceptions he gotta do it.
Where the Executive is able to meet the authorization mandatory goal while spending less than the amount appropriated a surplus exists. The surplus IMO isn’t a slush fund for the Executive (or Congress FWIW) instead he and Congress should put that to debt reduction. Another example might be where there is a Constitutional question/dispute between Congress and the Executive about the authorization purpose itself; if Congress authorized spending and appropriated funds for a mandatory firearm buy back and confiscation scheme then the Executive could and should tell Congress to pound sand b/c it is patently unconstitutional.
No, that’s not what this injunction is about. What the judge enjoined is a freeze imposed by the government on an entire category of spending, which is what Trump did in his executive order. The president is free to freeze any specific grant, which he suspects is being misused in some way. What he can’t do is freeze “all spending on foreign aid”, or “all spending on education”, or whatever. Only Congress can do that. Executive discretion has to be on a retail basis, not a wholesale basis. At least until this injunction runs out, is lifted, or is stayed.
It’s the same as the distinction between pardoning an individual and giving a blanket pardon to an entire category of people. Governors of Virginia, for instance, can’t pardon entire categories, they have to pardon people one at a time. US presidents can pardon entire categories, and never even know the names of the people they’ve pardoned.
PS In case it wasn’t clear, I am not saying that categorical freezes are beyond the president’s power. What I’m saying is that they are what this judge has enjoined. Even under the injunction he can still freeze individual spending items, either one at a time or by signing one document that names each of the items.
And of course if he has obtained competent legal advice that the injunction is ultra vires he has the option of ignoring it, and accepting the consequences should SCOTUS eventually decide his advice was wrong.
testing
Weird. It doesn’t allow replies to my previous comment but it does to this one.
Congress appropriates funds but doesn’t really get into the nuts and bolts of the spending, that is what the agencies do. They give the Dept of Education $300,000,00,000 and the DOE spends it. If a Judge is ordering Congress to specify where every dollar on every grant is going Congress is going to have a lot of work in front of it.
If Congress funds, say, USAID and says “hey, here is $100 Million” and USAID is under the Executive Branch then Trump can say thanks and direct how that money is spent. Congress could give the DOD $1 Trillion, under Hegseth they could spend $900 Billion and Trump could then say we are giving the American People that unused $100 Billion back and let Congress argue against it. Tough position to be in.
Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes it does. That’s what “earmarks” are. You may recall that about 20 years ago there was a big groundswell of opinion on our side of politics against earmarks. Instapundit was part of it. But I was against it because the case against earmarks is basically saying the elected congress should not have the power of the purse, the unelected bureaucrats should.