“Instead of working with us to keep the public safe and lower costs for hardworking New Jerseyans, the Trump Administration has recklessly and illegally gutted federal funding for public safety, disaster preparedness, scientific research, clean water, and more,” New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said in a press release.
A federal court has ruled that the Trump administration cannot rely on an obscure clause to make far-ranging cuts to government agencies.
According to The Associated Press, twenty-three states filed a lawsuit last year accusing the administration of using the clause to make cuts to everything from funds for crime prevention to food security and scientific research. The states behind the case were concerned that the White House could start chipping away at a wider range of grants.
In her ruling, Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted a summary judgment against the administration, effectively preventing it from using the clause to continue making cuts; Talwani also rejected the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety.
“Defendants’ interpretation of the Termination Clause is not clearly supported by the text of the provision, runs counter to the regulatory scheme, receives no support in the rulemaking history, and would violate the Spending Clause’s requirement that conditions be imposed unambiguously,” said Talwani, an Obama appointee.
The lawsuit, notes The Associated Press, suggested that the federal Office of Management and Budget had attempted to promulgate the clause to justify what it described as a “nationwide slash-and-burn campaign.”
The clause, introduced in 2020 and revised again in 2024, says that federal agents can terminate a grant if the award “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” While the language was put into place by the Biden administration, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that, under Trump, it has been used to target grants and other already-allocated funds.
“Instead of working with us to keep the public safe and lower costs for hardworking New Jerseyans, the Trump Administration has recklessly and illegally gutted federal funding for public safety, disaster preparedness, scientific research, clean water, and more,” New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said in a press release.
“Today’s decision is an important win for all New Jerseyans and confirms that the Trump Administration defied the law when it embarked on its campaign to gut critical federal funding to the states,” Davenport said. “The President and his allies cannot hold critical programs hostage to their personal whims and political ideologies, destabilizing the country by yanking essential federal funding that was already awarded to the states.”
The Trump administration, for its part, described the lawsuit as “extraordinarily unusual” and argued that it should be dismissed, saying that the states’ concerns about future grants were too speculative to form the basis of an actionable claim. The government also accused the attorneys general, most of whom are Democrats, of “raising blanket, undifferentiated objections” to the termination of thousands of grants without request relief that could, realistically, “restore a single grant.”
“That mismatch between the allegedly unlawful agency ‘decision’ on one hand, and the amorphous relief requested in this suit, on the other, creates a set of jurisdiction and justiciability defects that doom this lawsuit at the threshold,” the administration said.
Sources
Federal judge bars Trump administration from using obscure clause to make huge funding cuts
Judge rules OMB can’t retroactively nix grants based on new rules
US judge says Trump administration cannot revoke grants that conflict with its priorities
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