A federal judge blocked President Trump’s planned freeze on federal grants and loans on Tuesday evening, just before it was supposed to go into effect.
The freeze is part of an effort to curb trillions of dollars in federal spending. U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan’s administrative stay has blocked the Trump administration’s measure until at least Monday, in response to an appeal filed by a network of nonprofit groups.
AliKhan’s decision comes after Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director Matthew Vaeth ordered agencies to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance” and “identify and review all Federal financial assistance programs and supporting activities consistent with the President’s policies and requirements” on Monday evening.
During her first White House press briefing on Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the directive was the Trump administration’s effort to be “good stewards for tax dollars.”
“I think this is a very reasonable measure,” she said, adding that the freeze would allow the government time to cut back diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives that Trump opposes. Programs “that [provide] direct benefits to individuals,” including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and Medicare and Social Security would not be affected, Leavitt added.
The act is “not a blanket pause on federal assistance,” Leavitt clarified.
“What does this pause mean? It means no more funding for illegal DEI programs,” she said. “It means no more funding for the Green New Scam that has cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. It means no more funding for transgenderism and wokeness across our federal bureaucracy and agencies, no more funding for Green New Deal social engineering policies.”
While some Democratic lawmakers reported that their states’s online Medicaid portals went down after the OMB issued its memo, Leavitt said on X that the outage was not related to the freeze.
“The White House is aware of the Medicaid website portal outage. We have confirmed no payments have been affected — they are still being processed and sent. We expect the portal will be back online shortly.”
The freeze would put a halt on the $37 million that was slated to “go out the door to the World Health Organization, which is an organization, as you all know, that President Trump . . . no longer wants the United States to be a part of,” the press secretary said in the briefing, and the $50 million in taxpayer dollars that reportedly went to fund condoms being sent to Gaza.