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FILE — President Donald Trump throws pens used to sign executive orders to the crowd during an indoor Presidential Inauguration parade event in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025 (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File).
The Trump administration and a collection of nonprofits are fiercely arguing over the scope of a weeks-old court order that pumped the brakes on the controversial government spending freeze.
On Jan. 28, the National Council of Nonprofits (NCN) filed one of the first lawsuits against the defunding scheme. That same day, U.S. District Judge Loren L. AliKhan, a Joe Biden appointee, issued a stay on the freeze — which she later extended into a temporary restraining order. On Feb. 25, the judge issued a preliminary injunction.
On March 4, the plaintiffs accused the government of effectively violating the terms of the injunction by way of a “cramped interpretation” that has frozen some $3.6 billion in anti-homelessness funds that were previously “awarded to various grant recipients.”
On Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice fired back — accusing the plaintiffs of trying to squeeze “broader” relief out of the court.
“Plaintiffs’ requested relief highlights that they are seeking to use this Court as a superintendent over Executive Branch decisions relating to the obligation of funding,” the government’s response argues.
The disputed language bars agencies “from implementing, giving effect to, or reinstating under a different name the directives in” the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memorandum “with respect to the disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards.”
To hear the plaintiffs tell it, this language means the government has to fund grants that have been awarded but not yet paid.
The government, however, citing the original temporary restraining order, says the court defined “open awards” in a more limited fashion as “ones that have already been approved and partially disbursed.”
The injunction itself does not purport to define “open awards.” So, the nonprofits are asking AliKhan what she meant by that phrase.
“[Defendants] interpret the Court’s references to ‘all open awards’ in the preliminary injunction order to mean not ‘all’ open awards but instead only those open awards that have been ‘partially disbursed,”” the motion to clarify reads. “Plaintiffs respectfully submit that Defendants’ approach does not accord with either the letter or the reasoning of the Court’s preliminary injunction order and decision.”
The nonprofits offered up their preferred definition. They asked the court to define the term as “all awards that have been awarded — i.e., that the recipient has been notified of the decision to award the grant, loan, or other financial assistance or the award has otherwise been made public,” according to the motion to clarify.
The Trump administration insists there is no confusion to ferret out.
“The Court’s orders were unambiguous, and Plaintiffs did not object to Defendants’ use of this definition in their written notice regarding the Court’s temporary restraining order,” the motion in opposition reads. “The Court should reject Plaintiffs’ motion, because the Court’s order was not vague or ambiguous.”
The government also says the nonprofits have already relied on the definition in the temporary restraining order — and can’t change it now.
From the DOJ’s motion, at length:
In fact, Plaintiffs represented that the Court’s temporary restraining order provided them the relief they sought, and stated that their preliminary injunction motion was only requesting relief within the same bounds. Yet now, weeks after Defendant first filed a written notice containing this language, Plaintiffs seek to contest this definition of “open awards,” on the rationale that the Court’s own reference to open awards “does not appear to be what the Court was actually saying.”
The nonprofits say the “narrow interpretation” advanced by the government would result in substantial harm to its member groups.
“[T]he harms from Defendants’ irrational Freeze Order would be especially severe for those who had already been awarded and were counting on receiving (or may even have begun to draw on) federal financial assistance,” the motion to clarify reads. “That reasonable reliance on being able to access financial assistance that has already been awarded, and the harms to recipients from Defendants’ sudden halt to such assistance, exist regardless of whether disbursement on an open award has yet begun.”
The nonprofits go on to say they believe the injunction does, in fact, cover such awards but acknowledge the court may not have understood its own order to deal with such funding. So, in the alternative, the plaintiffs “ask that the Court address such awards now.”
The government counters that the enjoined behavior is all about “disbursements” and argues the plaintiffs want to fashion a new order that encompasses the “obligation” of funding.
“Plaintiffs’ attempt to do so only underscores the fact that they seek to use this lawsuit to turn this Court into a superintendent over countless Executive Branch decisions made by non-defendant agencies relating to federal funding,” the motion in opposition reads. “This would include superintending individual agency decisions such as the signing of grant agreements or the determination of whether applicants have satisfied conditions imposed on their awards.”
The nonprofits now have until March 10 to file a final motion on this issue.
