A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Tuesday evening temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s effort to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal grants and loans, quieting the chaos and confusion that had gripped states, cities and government contractors across the country but not ending the uncertainty.
Judge Loren AliKhan’s decision to block the freeze with an “administrative stay,” came in response to a lawsuit filed by Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization. The group argued that the Trump administration’s order, issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget late on Monday, violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that governs the executive branch’s rule-making authorities. The judge said she would hold a hearing to consider a more permanent decision on Feb. 3.
Separately, attorneys general from 22 states and the District of Columbia filed a second lawsuit Tuesday evening that also sought to thwart Mr. Trump’s effort to freeze funding, pending his administration’s review of whether the spending comported with his priorities.
The legal wrangling came against a backdrop of bewilderment from coast to coast after Matthew J. Vaeth, the acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, announced in a two-page memo Monday night that federal agencies were to “temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all federal financial assistance,” specifically citing “D.E.I., woke gender ideology and the Green New Deal.”
Attorney General Rob Bonta of California said the order’s ambiguous wording was “by design” and was intended to provoke uncertainty. In an interview, he called the order “reckless and dangerous.”
The ruling by Judge Loren L. AliKhan marked the second time that a federal judge has intervened to pause Mr. Trump’s expansive interpretation of his own powers in order to let a legal challenge proceed. On Thursday, Judge John C. Coughenour of the Western District of Washington issued a temporary restraining order that blocked an attempt by Mr. Trump to end automatic citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil. Judge Coughenour was nominated to the bench by President Ronald Reagan; Judge AliKhan by President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Skye L. Perryman, Democracy Forward’s president and chief executive, praised Judge AliKhan’s initial ruling. “We are grateful for this administrative stay to allow our clients time to sort through the chaos created by the Trump administration’s hasty and ill-advised actions,” she said in a statement.
The White House press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Judge AliKhan’s stay came as access to federal money for programs large and small was interrupted. State health agencies said they had been locked out of their Medicaid reimbursement portals. State officials said funding for preschools, community health centers, food for low-income families, housing assistance and disaster relief were all at risk. Universities were freezing new research grants.
Loan transactions involving the Department of Housing and Urban Development appeared to be in limbo, as lenders received word from administration officials that their deals could not go through. In a statement, the Washington state attorney general’s office said that funding for highways, substance abuse treatment and nursing care for veterans were all in jeopardy.
With even Republican states pleading for guidance, the White House and its budget office tried on Tuesday afternoon to dial back perceptions about the order’s scope, saying the funding pause did “not apply across-the-board” and was limited to programs implicated by the president’s executive orders, including those “that undermine the national interest.”
But the language in the initial order was more sweeping. It mandated that any spending “that may be implicated” by Mr. Trump’s executive orders be frozen, “including but not limited to” money allocated for “foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal.”
Democrats said the White House was downplaying a freeze that had already affected programs that officials insisted had been held harmless.
The funding freeze followed other unilateral moves by Mr. Trump in his first days that have already yielded lawsuits. An executive order that attempted to reverse the 14th Amendment’s longstanding guarantee to birthright citizenship was stayed by a federal judge in Seattle. Other orders to make it easier to fire federal employees, ban transgender Americans from serving in the military and create a new federal department from scratch will also end up in court.
Ultimately, judges — about one-quarter of whom were nominated by Mr. Trump during his first term — will decide whether the president’s expansive interpretation of his own powers comports with the law and the Constitution. Some of these challenges are likely to be appealed up to the Supreme Court, where three of the nine sitting justices are Trump nominees, and which has already shown considerable deference to the presidency with its broad grant of immunity from criminal prosecution.
But in the view of the attorneys general who filed the suit, one thing is clear: The president cannot assume the power of the purse that the Constitution confers on Congress.
“Jan. 20 was an inauguration, not a coronation,” Illinois’s attorney general, Kwame Raoul, said. “Congress is given the power to appropriate the funding.”
Two longstanding federal laws — the Impoundment Control Act and the Antideficiency Act — are supposed to buttress Congress’s prerogative, saying that the executive branch must spend money appropriated by the legislative branch and cannot spend money allocated by Congress for one program on another more to a president’s liking.
Still, Samuel R. Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor and former general counsel to the Department of Health and Human Services under President Biden, said that while it would be difficult to find a legal justification for Monday’s memo, it could be part of an attempt to lay the groundwork for a novel legal claim that “the president has an inherent constitutional power to decide whether to spend money that’s been appropriated.”
He said that could resonate with some conservative judges, who, he said, have been “very supportive of executive power when Republicans are in office.”
The second lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, is being led by the attorneys general from New York, California, Illinois, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island. Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia are also plaintiffs.
The Trump administration was engaging in “extreme conduct, even beyond what many have anticipated,” Ms. Perryman, the head of Democracy Forward, said in an interview. “Look at what has happened in just eight days,” she said. “This is giving us a sense of what the American people are in for.”
Jonah E. Bromwich and Seamus Hughes contributed reporting.
