FEMA Tries to Appease Trump by Ignoring Court Order on Funding Freeze

Donald Trump’s illegal funding freeze just won’t stop.

A senior official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered employees to place financial holds on a range of the agency’s grant programs, in defiance of a federal judge’s restraining order against the Trump administration’s sweeping funding freeze, NBC News reported Tuesday.

In an email sent Monday, Stacey Street, FEMA’s director of the Office of Grant Administration, ordered her subordinates to “put financial holds on all of your awards—all open awards, all years (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).”

NBC obtained screenshots of the email from one of the recipients.

“There’s a lot of people who are running scared and trying to appease [the new administration],” said the recipient, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“This is a violation of the court order.”

Earlier Monday, U.S. District Judge John J. McConnell had said that the Trump administration had continued to block federal grants, ignoring the judge’s previous directive restraining the disastrous executive order that would have stripped funding from an array of essential government services.

Trump reaffirmed his intention to get rid of the “slow and totally ineffective” FEMA, in an angry post on Truth Social Tuesday. The Department of Homeland Security announced the dismissal of four FEMA employees Tuesday, after Elon Musk claimed that DOGE had discovered nearly $60 million in funds going to house undocumented immigrants in New York City just last week.

Donald Trump is once again threatening to destroy the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The president took aim at the agency, which provides essential disaster aid, in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.

“FEMA spent tens of millions of dollars in Democrat areas, disobeying orders, but left the people of North Carolina high and dry. It is now under review and investigation,” Trump wrote. “THE BIDEN RUN FEMA HAS BEEN A DISASTER. FEMA SHOULD BE TERMINATED! IT HAS BEEN SLOW AND TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE. INDIVIDUAL STATES SHOULD HANDLE STORMS, ETC., AS THEY COME. BIG SAVINGS, FAR MORE EFFICIENT!!!”

Trump’s tantrum comes one day after Elon Musk claimed that the Department of Government Efficiency had “discovered” that FEMA had provided nearly $60 million to house undocumented immigrants in New York City last week.

“Sending this money violated the law and is in gross insubordination to the President’s executive order,” Musk fumed on X. “That money is meant for American disaster relief and instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals! A clawback demand will be made today to recoup those funds.”

The Department of Homeland Security announced Tuesday that the four “deep state activist” FEMA officials who made the payments had been fired.

Trump has floated the idea of scrapping FEMA multiple times. Most recently, he weighed shutting down the agency while residents of Los Angeles County coped with ongoing wildfires.

“I like, frankly, the concept when North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it. Meaning the state takes care of it,” Trump told reporters last month. (Florida receives the most funding from FEMA of any state.)

Trump said that assistance for states affected by natural disasters would be run directly through his administration, ensuring that he can use it as political leverage to reform the policies of Democratic-led states and cities.

The president previously said that he planned to sign an executive order reforming—or even abolishing—the agency. It’s unclear if this is still his plan, and his social media posting is simply setting the stage for what’s to come.

Now we know just how serious Trump is about acting outside of his authority as president to gut federal agencies: Since he made this initial statement, Trump’s administration has illegally taken the ax to USAID.

Donald Trump has made odd jokes and eyebrow-raising militaristic threats about buying Greenland, but on Tuesday, at least one Republican lawmaker took the idea a step further, pitching an entirely new identity for the Danish territory.

A new bill filed in the House by Georgia Representative Buddy Carter offered a new name for the autonomous region once it’s folded under the U.S. banner, though the title sounds more like a Saturday Night Live punchline than a legitimate rebrand.

“Greenland shall be known as ‘Red, White, and Blueland’,” the text of the bill reads, authorizing the president to enter into negotiations with the government of Denmark to purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland. “Any reference in a law, map, regulation, document, paper, or other record of the U.S. to Greenland shall be deemed to be a reference to ‘Red, White, and Blueland.’”

In an attached statement, Carter gave Trump free license to pursue Greenland under the belief that the territory is suddenly a national security priority, celebrating that the absorption of Greenland into America would, quite literally, make the nation “bigger than ever.”

“President Trump has correctly identified the purchase of what is now Greenland as a national security priority, and we will proudly welcome its people to join the freest nation to ever exist when our Negotiator-in-Chief inks this monumental deal,” Carter said.

In January, a trip to Greenland by Donald Trump Jr., far-right political pundit Charlie Kirk, and Trump administration staffer Sergio Gor only served to heighten tensions between the United States and the island’s inhabitants.

Pipaluk Lynge, the chair of Greenland’s parliamentary Foreign and Security Policy Committee, told Politico at the time that the territory wants its “own independence and democracy.” Lynge also warned the U.S. not to “invade” the nation, which is largely composed of Indigenous tribes, in light of its historical treatment of Alaska’s Indigenous population.

The trio’s presence on the island—and myriad photo ops with local residents—was further torched as a stunt to make the territory appear open to U.S. governance.

Local criticism extended to a series of photos featuring Kirk and Greenlandic residents in MAGA hats, which Danish media reported was staged. The MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit.

“All they have to do is put on a cap and be in the Trump staff’s videos. They are being bribed, and it is deeply distasteful,” Tom Amtoft, a 28-year resident of Nuuk, told Danish news outlet DR News.

Amtoft reportedly witnessed the group’s attempts to get locals to wear the MAGA caps for the photos, describing the process as “very aggressive.” He said the Trump envoys chose a “selective” group of people “who could say that Greenland should be bought.”

A late-January poll by pollster Verian found that 85 percent of Greenland’s residents do not want to become part of the United States. Just 6 percent were in favor of the switch, while 8 percent were undecided, according to The Guardian.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is falling in line with the rest of MAGA and attacking the Constitution’s separation of powers.

CNN reporter Manu Raju asked Johnson on Tuesday what he thought about JD Vance’s Sunday X post attacking ​​a federal judge who blocked Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury Department records.

Much like Donald Trump, who said that “no judge should frankly be allowed to make that kind of a decision,” Johnson’s response was to back Vance and Musk. The Louisiana representative said he agreed with the vice president and met with Musk on Monday, adding that courts should “take a step back” to let the Trump administration continue.

On Sunday, Musk and Vance attacked the judge blocking DOGE, and by extension, the judicial branch of government and the concept of judicial review, which allows the courts to determine whether a law is in accordance with the Constitution. Musk claimed U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer was “a corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” Vance had a more detailed, but equally worrying, response.

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal. Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vance posted.

Meanwhile, on Monday, another judge claimed Trump is failing to comply with the temporary restraining order on his funding freeze—making it clear his administration is testing the limits of executive power.

With leading Republicans, along with oligarch Musk, questioning any checks on the executive branch’s power, the United States might soon be headed to a constitutional crisis over Trump and Musk’s attempts to overhaul the government. Congress doesn’t have the two-thirds Republican majority needed to impeach judges who go against the president and his billionaire adviser/boss, so America might soon see a president who openly defies legal rulings. But hey, the Supreme Court already gave him near-total immunity.

Vice President and recently converted Catholic J.D. Vance was rebuked by the pope himself for using Catholic theology to justify mass deportations and isolationism. 

Vance started the fire when he recently went on Fox News and presented his own bastardized version of “ordo amoris,” Latin for “the order of love.” 

“There is … a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world,” Vance said at the end of January. “A lot of the far left has completely inverted that; they seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside of their own borders.… The British prime minister should care about Brits, and the French should care about the French.”  

Pope Francis sent a message on Tuesday to clear up Vance’s comments. Without mentioning the vice president by name, he attacked Vance’s entire logic for the Trump administration’s cruel policies.

“Christians know very well that it is only by affirming the infinite dignity of all that our own identity as persons and as communities reaches its maturity. Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: The human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation,” Pope Francis wrote (emphasis added). “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the ‘Good Samaritan’ (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”

The Good Samaritan parable tells of a Jewish man left beaten and bloodied, barely alive, on the side of a road. While a Jewish priest walks past him, a Samaritan—an enemy of the Jews—comes to his aid. Vance couldn’t be further off from the Bible’s original message. 

“This misses the point of Jesus’s Parable of the Good Samaritan,” Jesuit priest and editor James Martin wrote shortly after Vance’s Fox interview. “Jesus’s fundamental message is that *everyone* is your neighbor, and that it is not about helping just your family or those closest to you. It’s specifically about helping those who seem different, foreign, other. They are all our ‘neighbors.’ But Jesus’s deeper point can only be understood from the point of view of the beaten man: our ultimate salvation depends, as it did for that man, upon those whom we often consider to be the ‘stranger.’”

This rhetoric comes as the Trump administration undergoes its ambitious and cruel mass deportation program, detaining immigrants in Guantánamo Bay and potentially soon Salvadoran mega-jails. They’ve also pushed for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza so that they can make their homeland prime real estate. So much for the party of God.