Freezing-Unfreezing - Part 2

From an email by Jason Sisney of the Legislative Analyst's Office:

...[On] January 31, 2025, a coalition of states, including California (represented by Attorney General Rob Bonta), secured a temporary restraining order (TRO) that President Trump, OMB, and other federal defendants “during the pendency of the TRO…shall not pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate Defendants’ compliance with awards and obligations to provide federal financial assistance to the States, and Defendants shall not impede the States’ access to such awards and obligations, except on the basis of the applicable authorizing statutes, regulations, and terms.” Federal defendants also are barred “from reissuing, adopting, implementing, or otherwise giving effort to the OMB Directive under any other name or title or through any other Defendants (or agency supervised, administered, or controlled by any Defendant), such as the continued implementation identified by the White House Press Secretary’s statement of January 29, 2025.”* The TRO was filed in Rhode Island’s U.S. District Court.

The Rhode Island judge noted in the order that “the pause in federal funding will also hurt current disaster relief efforts,” citing support for disaster recovery in both North Carolina and California. The judge noted threats to drug trafficking enforcement, highway planning and construction, childcare, veteran nursing care funding, special education grants, and state health departments. In total, the order says, “the States have set forth facts showing that the Executive’s abrupt ‘pause’ in potentially trillions of dollars of federal funding will cause a ripple effect that would directly impact the States and other’s ability to provide and administer vital services and relief to their citizens.”

Previously, on January 28, a District of Columbia U.S. District Court judge issued an administrative stay, preventing implementation of the OMB directive “with respect to the disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards” until 5 p.m. on February 3. Despite the prior court orders, some entities still report freezes of federal funds being implemented, perhaps via means other than the initial OMB directive...

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*As blog readers will likely know, the press secretary said that the order would only block the OMB directive, but not the freeze, whatever that was supposed to mean.

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The degree to which this back and forth on the freeze has affected the flow of funds to UC of federal grants, or consideration of grant applications by federal agencies, is not clear.