Judge Shuts Down Trump’s Funding Freeze—and Orders Immediate Reversal

A federal judge on Monday ordered Donald Trump to unfreeze funding for federal grant programs—and immediately release funds for key programs.

U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnell ruled that the Trump administration’s funding freeze is continuing to violate a temporary restraining order, or TRO, he issued last month that blocked Trump’s blanket freeze.

“The Defendants must resume the funding of institutes and other agencies of the Defendants (for example the National Institute for Health) that are included in the scope of the court’s TRO,” McConnell wrote in the ruling.

He also ordered the president to restore funds to the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act, both of which were enacted under Biden.

“The broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds is, as the Court found, likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country,” McConnell wrote.

Last month, the Office of Management and Budget issued a two-page memo ordering a pause on all “disbursement of all federal financial assistance.” The budget freeze, which would affect more than 2,600 accounts across the government, sent the public sector into a frenzy. The memo was rescinded the next day, but the Trump administration maintained the freeze was still in place, which led to even more confusion and anxiety.

Despite last month’s court order, Democratic attorneys general from 22 different states warned that millions of federal funds, the majority of which came from the IRA and the IIJA, were still on hold. The states urged McConnell to enforce the TRO.

“While it is imaginable that a certain amount of machinery would need to be re-tooled in order to undo the breadth of the Federal Funding Freeze, there is no world in which these scattershot outages, which as of this writing impact billions of dollars in federal funding across the Plaintiff States, can constitute compliance with this Court’s Order,” they wrote in an emergency motion Friday.

“This Court should enforce the plain text of its temporary restraining order and order Defendants to immediately restore funds,” the motion reads.

This story has been updated.

Republicans may feel that they’re on the up and up, armed with Donald Trump in the White House and a trifecta at the federal level, but former insiders of the conservative party argue that the GOP’s inability to stand up to its executive leader is becoming an unsolvable problem.

Speaking with MSNBC on Sunday, former Florida Representative David Jolly claimed that Republicans have no targetable solutions for some of Congress’s chief jobs due to the legislative branch’s constant deference to Trump’s will.

“I don’t think Republicans in Congress know what they’re doing right now,” Jolly said. “They have a government funding cliff and a debt ceiling coming up in four weeks, and they don’t even know how to solve that.

“I think, Alex, that we’re in a constitutional crisis. I really believe that, people are tepid in saying that—but I would say not just because of Trump and [Elon] Musk, though they’re facilitating it,” Jolly continued. “The constitutional crisis is because the Republican Congress has collapsed.

“It is listless and meaningless, it is not providing the check that the Constitution suggests it should in this environment,” he said, arguing that the only existing check that remains on the “lawlessness and corruption” of Trump and Musk’s power is in the courts, which “takes time.”

“But the immediate ability to rush to the fire is the Congress, and they’ve just laid down and said ‘Hey, Donald Trump is running this place, and Elon Musk is as well, and we’re giving up any authority,’” Jolly said.

Jolly also had harsh words for the MAGA leader’s open-armed reception of the world’s richest man, whose spending-fixated department tapped into federal databases with info on hundreds of millions of Americans, including sensitive details such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, and medical histories.

“How do you think Elon Musk’s cover-boy treatment was received in the White House?” asked MSNBC’s Alex Witt, referring to the billionaire’s front-page spread on Time magazine’s February issue.

“Elon Musk is either a co-president or a first spouse right now, given the power that he’s wielding and the lack of accountability,” Jolly said.

Whether Musk even has the proper clearances to access such sensitive data has been an ongoing topic of discussion. Last week, Trump designated Musk a “special government employee,” which, per the Justice Department, is “anyone who works, or is expected to work, for the government for 130 days or less in a 365-day period.” But hours after the appointment, even top officials in the administration weren’t confident that Musk had cleared a background check to do the job.

The Trump administration is pushing back against a federal court order blocking Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing critical payment systems in the Treasury Department.

Attorneys in the Justice Department wrote an 11-page court filing late Sunday night that the order was “impermissible” and “anti-constitutional,” claiming that “basic democratic accountability requires that every executive agency’s work be supervised by politically accountable leadership, who ultimately answer to the president.”

The attorneys addressed their complaint to U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas in Manhattan, asking her to stop or modify the order and allow Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Trump-appointed leaders to be briefed on the payment system. The original order blocking the DOGE takeover came from U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer on Saturday, who restricted access to career employees with proper training.

The order was the result of a lawsuit from 19 Democratic attorneys general over the access DOGE was given in the Treasury Department, alleging that Musk’s cronies were putting the critical federal payments system, which manages trillions of dollars in federal disbursements, at risk of manipulation or hacking.

According to Politico, DOJ lawyers are negotiating with the 19 states for an agreement to make Engelmayer’s order more narrowly tailored. On Monday, Vargas said that if there was no agreement by 5 p.m., she would demand an expedited review by late Monday night.

Trump allies are furious over the order, claiming that it could even bar Bessent, confirmed by the Senate, from running his own department. Some of them have even suggested ignoring the order, Politico reports. Still, the DOJ says that Treasury officials are complying with the order.

One of Musk’s henchmen, Marko Elez, reportedly had administrative access to sensitive federal payment systems and was even rewriting code, before resigning after his racist social media posts came to light last week. In X posts last week, Musk suggested that Elez would be rehired, but the Justice Department’s court filing only states that he resigned and that he returned materials and equipment.

DOGE employees have been allowed access in not just the Treasury Department but all over the federal government, including the Department of Energy, which manages the country’s nuclear arsenal, and the agency that manages the federal workforce, the Office of Personnel Management.

In some cases, federal court orders have restricted or even barred DOGE’s access, but Trump, Musk, and Vice President JD Vance are openly discussing defying the federal judiciary and igniting a constitutional crisis. The next several months will be pivotal not just for the future of the federal government, but also for the country.

Donald Trump is fleshing out his idea of taking over the Gaza Strip—but it doesn’t include any long-term contingencies other than carving up the nation to be consumed by other countries in the Middle East.

“The White House press secretary told us last week that you’re committed to rebuilding Gaza. Steve Witkoff said that process would take 10 to 15 years,” started a reporter in the room, referring to the real estate developer and U.S. special envoy to the Middle East. “Does your commitment to rebuilding Gaza extend beyond your time in office?”

“I’m committed to buying and owning Gaza,” Trump said. “As far as us rebuilding it, we may give it to other states in the Middle East to build sections of it.

“We’re committed to owning it, taking it, and making sure that Hamas doesn’t move back,” Trump continued. “There’s nothing to move back into—the place is a demolition site. The remainder will be demolished. Everything’s demolished.

“I mean you can’t live in those buildings right now, they’re very unstable, but we’ll make it into a very good site for future development by somebody.”

That somebody could be Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has been eyeing the region for potential real estate projects since at least the beginning of last year. In March, Kushner praised Gaza’s waterfront beachfront property as “very valuable,” advocating at the time for the same plan that Trump touted last week: ethnic cleansing.

“It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up,” Kushner told Harvard’s Middle East Initiative faculty chair Tarek Masoud on March 8. “But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.”

The definition of ethnic cleansing is the mass expulsion or killing of members of an unwanted ethnic or religious group in a society, per the Oxford English Dictionary. Ethnic cleansing has not been identified as an independent crime under international law, according to the United Nations.

“People can come from all over the world and live there,” Trump continued during the press conference Monday. “But we’re going to take care of the Palestinians. We’re going to make sure they live beautifully and in harmony and in peace and that they’re not murdered.

“This has been the most dangerous site anywhere in the world to live,” Trump added, not mentioning the fact that mass casualties in Gaza have overwhelmingly been at Israel’s hands.

By last week, more than 61,000 Palestinians had been killed in the war with Israel, per the Gaza Government Information Office. Over 15 months of fighting, Israel has cut off access to water, electricity, and food in the region under the banner of rooting out Hamas soldiers behind the October 7, 2023, attack. With the aid of American taxpayer dollars, they also decimated hospitals, health clinics, pharmacies, and shelters for millions of people in Gaza. Among those dead are 17,881 children, including 214 newborn infants.

Trump is looking to undo decades of racial progress within the military in his first month as president. 

On Monday morning, the president announced on Truth Social that he would be firing the “Board of Visitors” of each military academy, accusing the outside advisory boards meant to guide students of being “infiltrated” by wokeness. These boards are made up of military officers and current members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties. 

“Our Service Academies have been infiltrated by Woke Leftist Ideologues over the last four years. I have ordered the immediate dismissal of the Board of Visitors for the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard,” the president wrote on Truth Social Monday morning. “We will have the strongest Military in History, and that begins by appointing new individuals to these Boards. We must make the Military Academies GREAT AGAIN!”

This move aligns with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s well-documented war on racial and gender diversity in the military, and MAGA’s general war on whatever they consider “woke.” Last week, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point eliminated clubs like the Asian Pacific Forum Club, Japanese Forum Club, National Society of Black Engineers, Korean-American Relations Seminar, Vietnamese-American Cadet Association, and the Native American Heritage Forum, among others. In his first week in office, Trump also signed an executive order gutting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs in the military. This purging of basic cultural awareness from the military is in full swing.