The Constitution of the United States requires the president to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. All that means, in plain English, is that when an act of Congress becomes law, the chief executive only has one job: to be a faithful steward of it. In the early days of the first Donald Trump administration, a cadre of lawyers and attorneys general aligned with the Democratic Party strategized around invoking that constitutional requirement against him—in essence, to bring a case that would get the courts to declare that he must in good faith enforce the laws of the United States, even those he may not personally agree with.
Some eight years later, with Trump back in power, that basic tenet of constitutional governance, and others, is being tested, disrupted, if not ignored altogether by a president who just two weeks ago swore an oath—his second—to preserve, protect, and defend it. And late on Friday, in response to a “wide-ranging, all-encompassing, and ambiguous” freeze on critical federal funding that Trump demanded during his first days in office, wreaking havoc and upending lives across the US and beyond, a federal judge in New England ordered his administration to stop some of it.
The ruling by John McConnell, the chief judge in the federal district court in Rhode Island, was categorical. “During the pendency of the Temporary Restraining Order, Defendants 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,” McConnell wrote.
As that language suggests, the order was in response to a multistate lawsuit, led by New York, broadly challenging the Trump administration’s across-the-board spending freeze, which was set in motion a week earlier when Trump signed a flurry of executive orders targeting everything from foreign-aid assistance and nongovernmental organizations to conservative boogeymen including diversity measures, so-called woke gender ideology, and green-energy initiatives. The freeze turned into a frenzy once the White House Office of Management and Budget sent out a memorandum, now rescinded, instructing all federal agencies to institute a “temporary pause” on all programs so that the administration could figure out whether they aligned with “the law and the President’s priorities.”
The thing is, congressionally appropriated funds, signed by the president, are already “the law.” As McConnell found, “Congress has not given the Executive limitless power to broadly and indefinitely pause all funds that it has expressly directed to specific recipients and purposes and therefore the Executive’s actions violate the separation of powers.” In a post on Bluesky on Sunday, Lawfare editor in chief Benjamin Wittes posted a guidance document from the Department of Justice informing federal agencies that McConnell’s order is broad—such that even unlawful freezes in foreign aid, which are causing untold harm to humanitarian, democracy-sustaining, and public health projects in other nations, may be covered by it.
Or are they? Because in another filing on Monday, informing the judge that the Trump administration is in compliance, Justice Department lawyers sought clarification about the order’s scope. And they all but declared that the spending freeze is on in all other respects not covered by the ruling. “Given that the Plaintiffs only challenged the OMB Memorandum, Defendants do not read the Order to prevent the President or his advisors from communicating with federal agencies or the public about the President’s priorities regarding federal spending,” the lawyers wrote. “Nor do Defendants construe the Order as enjoining the President’s Executive Orders, which are plainly lawful and unchallenged in this case.”
With another ruling expected in Washington in a separate case challenging the spending chaos, and as federal agencies begin to process what these rulings and the guidance mean, this week will clarify what Maine senator Angus King has called “the most direct assault on the authority of Congress, I believe, in the history of the United States.”
There’s wisdom in not losing sight of the human impact of constitutional crises. In a declaration filed in federal court ahead of a hearing in Washington today, one tiny nonprofit in the ruby-red state of West Virginia, dedicated to serving people with disabilities, told the judge that the harm to its operations was ongoing. For one, the nonprofit, whose name is redacted, subsists “paycheck-to-paycheck”—and no payments have been received from the federal government since the freeze went into effect, leading to layoffs and reduced services.
“With the freeze still in effect we would have enough money on hand to function with our reduced skeleton staff for only two or three more weeks, serving only the consumers with the most dire and pressing needs,” the declaration reads. “On Friday, the Board recognized that if federal funds do not begin flowing again in the next two to three weeks, we would have no option other than to lay off the remaining two employees and cease all services.”
The affidavit is worth reading in full, if only to show that smash-and-grab governing can have a real effect on humans and some of the neediest among us. Expect more stories like this to surface in the days ahead—including on the human toll of dismantling USAID, which Trump and Elon Musk seem bent on shutting down, and the impact that will have on critical development funding in nations that truly need it. More recalcitrance from the Trump administration is almost certain, as the Justice Department has indicated in court. (And no, Trump cannot just defund an agency, let alone abolish it, with the stroke of a pen. You need a law for that.)
Here’s where it’s helpful to take a step back and consider the deeper meaning of Judge McConnell’s ruling, which will no doubt be appealed and taken all the way to the Supreme Court, if necessary. In rebuffing the Trump administration’s defense that the government is duty-bound “to align Federal spending and action with the will of the American people as expressed through Presidential priorities,” McConnell explained that that arrangement gets it exactly backward. That’s a “constitutionally flawed statement,” he wrote. “The Executive Branch has a duty to align federal spending and action with the will of the people as expressed through congressional appropriations, not through ‘Presidential priorities.’”
Appropriations is the constitutional term for the so-called power of the purse, which Congress controls through the budget process or other lawmaking. Trump can almost certainly influence future budgets, as he did during his first term, and work with lawmakers to get what he wants, or what he doesn’t want, in future appropriations. Or else call for the repeal of Joe Biden’s signature on the Inflation Reduction Act. But the current budget and the IRA are already the law. The president may not like it, but it’s his duty to abide by it. Alternatively, he can ask Congress to take action with the tools Congress has established: by notifying lawmakers that he’d like to effectuate a freeze, and get their blessing for it. As McConnell explained, nothing of the sort happened here.
