A federal judge granted an injunction Friday against President Donald Trump's spending freeze for woke programs, The Hill reported. Attorneys general from 22 states and Washington, D.C., filed a motion for an immediate injunction.
The Office of Management and Budget issued a memo Monday night demanding that federal agencies halt federal aid and grants if there was a misalignment of values with the Trump administration. The attorneys general sued to stop the administration from doing so.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell agreed that the edict would likely be thrown out and thus granted the injunction. "Are there some aspects of the pause that might be legal and appropriate constitutionally for the Executive to take?" the Obama-appointed judge asked rhetorically in his opinion.
"The Court imagines there are, but it is equally sure that there are many instances in the Executive Orders’ wide-ranging, all-encompassing, and ambiguous ‘pause’ of critical funding that are not. The Court must act in these early stages of the litigation under the ‘worst case scenario’ because the breadth and ambiguity of the Executive’s action makes it impossible to do otherwise," McConnell wrote.
Earlier in the week, Trump rescinded the order amid the legal action. However, McConnell noted that he believed the withdrawal "was in name only" because White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt promised that the underlying intention to freeze funding would remain.
The judge said the administration may have rescinded the memo "simply to defeat the jurisdiction of the courts. The substantive effect of the directive carries on," McConnell wrote.
The judge's order means that the administration may not proceed with directly cutting funding or implementing the OMB memo. The current injunction is temporary to allow further scrutiny based on the states' lawsuit.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is a longtime nemesis of Trump and led the states' lawsuits, was happy about the ruling. "I will keep fighting to protect essential services like childcare services that millions of Americans depend on," she posted to X, formerly Twitter, on Friday.
"The rule of law is not subject to the whims of the president," James added. Although James may be celebrating now, the fight is far from over.
According to Fox Business News, this memo was just a small portion of Trump's agenda to starve wokeism of federal funding. Trump has issued other orders to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at several government agencies to rid them of the rot.
Vice President J.D. Vance called DEI a "scandal that the president has stopped." Vance was speaking to Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures about Trump's most recent comments blaming woke hiring practices for a crash between a Black Hawk helicopter and a commercial airline this week that killed 67 people.
"We have to have our smartest people. It doesn't matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are," Vance said, echoing Trump.
"What matters is intellect, talent. The word 'talent.' They have to be talented geniuses. We can't have regular people doing that job. They won't be able to do it," he added about the aviation industry.
Trump was elected because of his hardline stance against wokeism and the problems it creates when merit is ignored. While the judge blocked one of Trump's battlegrounds for this fight, he shows no signs of backing down from the larger war against it.
