Federal Judge Orders White House to Keep Money Flowing to 22 States

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A court in Rhode Island issued a temporary restraining order to block Trump’s directive to defund programs he considers to be “woke.”

Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office with his hands folded on top of the desk in front of him.

Jan. 31, 2025, 5:42 p.m. ET

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Trump administration to keep taxpayer dollars flowing to 22 Democratic-leaning states for all congressionally approved government programs, including those that could run afoul of President Trump’s ideological tests.

The decision, signed by Judge John J. McConnell Jr., is a temporary but significant victory for the Democratic attorneys general from those states and the District of Columbia, who sued the administration in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. The order applies only to the states that filed the lawsuit.

It requires the administration not to “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” taxpayer money already allocated by Congress.

The 13-page order, for which Judge McConnell did not specify an expiration date, adds an obstacle to Mr. Trump’s plans to aggressively reshape the government around his own agenda; a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued an earlier administrative stay on Tuesday blocking the initial order from the White House Office of Management and Budget to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal money while the review for ideological compliance continued. That stay was set to expire on Monday.

The Trump administration has sent conflicting signals about the freeze, rescinding the memo that ordered it but signaling that the review of the ideological tilt of previously funded federal programs would continue.

“This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Wednesday, in a social-media post that was introduced as evidence in the lawsuit. She added that the president’s executive orders “on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.”