Federal Judge Blasts Trump’s “Ill-Conceived” Funding Freeze

A federal judge extended a block on the Office of Management and Budget’s sweeping order to freeze trillions in congressionally appropriated funds to federal agencies.

Judge Loren AliKhan sided Tuesday with a coalition of nonprofits that had sued the government over the budget freeze, describing the potential fallout of the Trump administration’s interference as “economically catastrophic” and in some cases “fatal” for the group that brought the case.

“In the simplest terms, the freeze was ill-conceived from the beginning,” AliKhan wrote in her ruling. “Defendants either wanted to pause up to $3 trillion in federal spending practically overnight, or they expected each federal agency to review every single one of its grants, loans, and funds for compliance in less than twenty-four hours. The breadth of that command is almost unfathomable.”

The extension is yet another blow to Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink federal spending. The coalition, which consisted of the National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, Main Street Alliance, and SAGE, had asked the court to halt the freeze on the basis that OMB does not have the authority to unilaterally shutter funding to hundreds of agencies that have already had their spending approved by Congress.

The spending suspension would have impacted upward of 2,600 accounts across the government and paused the distributions of tens of billions of dollars to programs across the nation unless those agencies proved that their funding initiatives fell in line with his agenda.

The Trump administration gave federal agencies mere hours to prove that their programs did not promote or support elements that Trump has derided as “woke” ideology, including “environmental justice,” abortion, DEI initiatives, and “woke gender” programs, or provide services to “illegal aliens,” in order to tap back into the cashflow, according to an OMB memo.

Programs that were expected to be impacted by the ax included infrastructure initiatives, housing assistance, disaster relief, educational programs, grants for suicide-prevention efforts, including the suicide lifeline, money for rural hospitals, opioid prevention funding, and HIV/AIDS treatment.

AliKhan had previously issued a temporary restraining order on the freeze but ultimately agreed with the nonprofits that the government “may be crossing a constitutional line” in attempting to completely choke Congress’s purse strings.

“The scope of power OMB seeks to claim is ‘breathtaking,’ and its ramifications are massive,” wrote AliKhan. “Because there is no clear statutory hook for this broad assertion of power, plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits of this claim.”

In her ruling, AliKhan pointed to a “mountain of evidence” brought by the nonprofit coalition that showed “even the threat of a funding freeze was enough to send countless organizations into complete disarray.” Furthermore, she wrote that the Trump administration could not provide a “reasonable explanation for why they needed to freeze all federal financial assistance in less than a day to ‘safeguard valuable taxpayer resources.’”

But while turning off the flow of federal cash streams appeared to be “alarmingly easy” for Trump officials, AliKhan noted that turning them back on has “proven much more difficult.”

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is working on an artificial intelligence tool that can automate its sweeping (sometimes mistaken) cuts to the federal work force, Wired reported Tuesday.

Engineers at DOGE have been working on AutoRIF, a program developed by the Department of Defense. Its name stands for Automated Reduction in Force, and it has the capability to automatically generate lists of government employees, ranking them in order of how subject they are to being fired—a task traditionally done by human resources—a former government H.R. employee told Wired.

“However, even with the use of any automated system, the OPM guidance says all data has to be confirmed manually and that employees (or their representative) are allowed to examine the registers,” the employee added.

DOGE employees appeared to have accessed AutoRIF’s code in the Office of Personnel Management’s system, and have begun editing its code. The screenshots indicate that one DOGE employee, Riccardo Biasini, a former engineer at Tesla, has been shearing the code.

Federal government employees are bracing themselves for a second round of sweeping, government-wide layoffs. The first round of layoffs earlier this month targeted probationary employees, who have worked for the government for less than a year and lack the same protections as their colleagues.

So far, the sweeping layoffs that have helped contribute to the whopping 95,000 eliminated government jobs have all been determined by human beings who combed through government databases looking for employees to prune.

But DOGE’s efforts to shrink the size of the federal workforce have already led to significant issues, as essential workers are mistakenly dismissed and government agencies are sent scrambling to hire them back.

Earlier this month, the Department of Agriculture needed to rescind the terminations of “several” agency employees who were actively working to address the ongoing bird flu outbreak. A whopping 300 employees who oversee America’s nuclear stockpile were fired from the National Nuclear Security Administration and then quickly invited to return to their highly essential jobs. In another close call, approximately 950 employees at the Indian Health Service were informed that they would receive termination notices, but their jobs were miraculously saved by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the last minute.

It’s not clear that employing an AI model would help to mitigate these mistakes, only make the pruning of federal employees that much more inhuman.

The White House wants everyone to know that the Department of Government Efficiency is incredibly transparent. They also don’t want you to know who’s actually running it.

During a White House press briefing Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt refused to name the administrator of DOGE, and in the same breath lauded the Trump administration’s transparency on the inner workings of its government-destroying machine. 

One reporter asked Leavitt to follow up on a hearing that had taken place the day before in Washington, where a Justice Department lawyer had openly admitted to the judge that he didn’t know who the administrator of DOGE was, while defending the organization’s unfettered access to sensitive government records. 

“Can you tell us who the administrator of DOGE is?” the reporter asked Leavitt.  

“Again, I’ve been asked and answered this question,” Leavitt replied, proceeding not to answer it. “Elon Musk is overseeing DOGE. There are—”

“Is he the administrator?” the reporter pressed. 

“No, Elon Musk is a special government employee, which I’ve also been asked and have answered that question as well,” Leavitt said.

“Who is the administrator?” the reporter pressed again. 

“There are career officials at DOGE. There are political appointees at DOGE. I am not going to reveal the name of that individual from this podium,” Leavitt said. 

“I am happy to follow up and provide that to you, but we have been incredibly transparent about the way that DOGE is working.”

To lend some perspective on the Trump administration’s obvious obfuscation, there is no reason to keep the identity of anyone running a federal department secret—and the names of those people are both in the public interest and publicly available, with the one exception of DOGE.

Only after the press briefing did it come out that Amy Gleason is the acting director of DOGE. It’s not clear she knows this, however—she was in Mexico when reached by reporters, despite the fact that the DOGE head has made in-office work a centerpiece of his reign of terror.

Gleason has served as the “senior adviser” to the U.S. Digital Service since the beginning of January, according to her LinkedIn page. Gleason previously worked for the USDS between 2018 and 2021. 

The USDS was originally an Obama-era group created to respond to issues with the Affordable Care Act’s website, and it later served as a port of technologists responsible for updating government technology services. Upon entering office, Trump issued an executive order rebranding the agency as DOGE. 

It’s unclear whether Gleason outranks Musk, the billionaire bureaucrat the Trump administration insists maintains the reins on its budget-slashing operation. Nor, for that matter, is it clear if she actually has any meaningful authority at DOGE—or if she’s just a front for Musk. 

The Trump administration has decided to take over determining the press pool that covers the White House, shutting out the White House Correspondents’ Association. 

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced Tuesday that the White House’s press team would take over the press pool, effectively determining which journalists get to travel with Donald  Trump for their news coverage. 

“We want more outlets and new outlets to have a chance to take part in the press pool to cover this administration’s unprecedented achievements up close, front and center,” Leavitt said. “We are going to give the power back to the people who read your papers, who watch your television shows, and who listen to your radio stations.”

On Monday, a federal court ruled against restoring the Associated Press’s access to White House press events, causing Leavitt to declare victory and insist that “covering the American presidency in the most intimate and limited spaces in this White House … is a privilege, it is not a legal right.” The AP has been barred ever since Trump signed an executive order to change the Gulf of Mexico’s name to the Gulf of America, a change the wire service has not adopted. 

The WHCA issued a statement criticizing the Trump administration’s move, claiming that the White House gave no notice of the change and saying that it “tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.”

“Since its founding in 1914, the WHCA has sought to ensure that the reporters, photographers, producers and technicians who actually do the work—365 days of every year—decide amongst themselves how these rotations are operated, so as to ensure consistent professional standards and fairness in access on behalf of all readers, viewers and listeners,” WHCA President Eugene Daniels, a correspondent for Politico, said. 

It’s an unprecedented move for a president to determine the journalists that travel with him. In the past, presidents usually ignored the media outlets or journalists that they did not like, instead of barring them from the White House or Air Force One. The famously thin-skinned Trump has already filed lawsuits against media organizations he doesn’t like and is using the Federal Communications Commission to go after broadcast outlets that irk him. Now he’s trying to dictate news coverage of his administration. 

DOGE deleted the top five highest savings claims on its “wall of receipts” leaderboard after various news outlets pointed out multiple errors in its calculations, The New York Times’ David Fahrenthold reported Tuesday.

The savings, deleted with no explanation from DOGE or the White House, include: a $232 million cut to the Social Security Administration that actually amounted to only $560,000; an $8 billion cut at Immigration and Customs Enforcement that was actually only $8 million; and three $655 million cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development that ended up being a measly $18 million. These mistakes all seem to be completely avoidable human errors.

The bottom of DOGE’s savings list reads: “Scoreboard normalized to agency size and budget.

“This is a preliminary leaderboard, and there will likely be some initial mistakes in the relative rankings.”

DOGE had claimed earlier this week that it has saved $65 billion thanks to all of its cuts. Its website still boasts this number, despite the recently deleted claims.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to stop its U.S. Agency for International Development spending freeze, giving the government an 11:59 p.m. deadline on Wednesday to pay “all invoices and letter of credit drawdown requests” for work done prior to February 13.

Judge Amir Ali granted the motion to enforce his restraining order against the USAID budget freeze on Tuesday, noting that the Trump administration could take “no action to impede foreign assistance funds for work already completed,” according to Politico’s Kyle Cheney.

The motion comes nearly two weeks after Ali initially ordered the White House to stop withholding congressionally appropriated humanitarian aid that was supposed to be distributed by the agency. In his ruling, the judge underscored the financial devastation wreaked on the nation’s suppliers and nonprofits—who work in tandem with USAID to supply humanitarian assistance—by the spontaneous disruption.

Ali ultimately declined a request by a coalition of nonprofits to find the Trump administration in contempt of the order, though the judge did find that the White House was seemingly wasting time in order to cook up “a new, post hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension.”

The continued inaction led to a fiery moment between Ali and a Justice Department attorney on Tuesday, in which the judge became increasingly irate that the Trump administration could not point to any concrete actions they had taken to implement the restraining order.

“I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” Ali said, according to Cheney. “Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before February 13?”

“I’m not in a position to answer that,” the DOJ attorney responded.

USAID provides humanitarian assistance and funding for infrastructure and developmental tech in developing nations. The information obtained through the agency’s work immediately aids and shields American citizens. Data aggregated from aid missions around the world inform U.S. policy on issues ranging from public health to diplomacy. Earlier this month, news that there was an Ebola outbreak in Kampala, Uganda, was reported via a USAID mission, for example. Choosing to nix the agency would force the U.S. into an information dark age that could see the country caught off guard in future health crises.

Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk has made it a personal mission to dismantle USAID. Earlier this month, Musk slammed USAID—which distributed more than $40 billion in congressionally appropriated foreign aid in 2023 and has closed $86 billion in private-sector deals—as a “criminal organization” that is an “arm of the radical-left globalists.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin just offered to cut Donald Trump in on his invasion of Ukraine by pillaging its seized minerals.

After Ukraine initially refused to offer up its mineral reserves as payback for U.S. military aid, Putin has swooped in to offer the U.S. minerals from … Russian-occupied Ukraine. Putin told state media Monday that Russia was “ready to work with our partners, including the Americans” to access several mineral reserves across the country—and outside of it too, according to Politico.

The autocrat emphasized that Russia had “an order of magnitude more resources of this kind than Ukraine,” but it seems that his bid also included reserves in Ukraine. Putin name-dropped Donbas, a Ukrainian region occupied by Russian forces, and referred to the country’s seized lands as “so-called new historical territories.”

The offer comes as U.S. and Ukraine officials enter the final stages of a contentious mineral agreement.

The deal would funnel half of the Eastern European nation’s rare earth minerals—hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of materials used in tech and electronic products—into the American market but wouldn’t do anything to ensure Ukraine’s security or economic interests in the future.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy publicly balked at a deal proposed by the Trump administration Sunday, which would grant the U.S. preferential access to Ukraine’s critical mineral resources.

“I will not sign what ten generations of Ukrainians will have to pay back,” Zelenskiy said Sunday. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Justice Olga Stefanishyna wrote in a post on X Monday that U.S. and Ukrainian officials were “in the final stages” of negotiations.

On Monday, Trump held a meeting with the G7 Summit, where he said that he “emphasized the importance” of the proposed “Critical Minerals and Rare-Earths Deal” between the U.S. and Ukraine. The Trump administration has repeatedly pledged to bring an end to the war in Ukraine, but has also openly echoed Moscow’s rhetoric downplaying its role in the yearslong conflict. Last week, Trump claimed that Ukraine had actually invited Russia’s illegal and deadly incursion into its territory, and the U.S. also joined 18 countries that refused to sign a U.N. resolution to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine.

Should Trump accept Putin’s offer to raid Ukraine’s mineral resources, he won’t just be rubber-stamping Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he will be participating in it too!

House Speaker Mike Johnson refused Tuesday to promise not to cut Medicaid. 

At a press conference, Johnson was asked by a reporter if “unequivocally … further down the line, there won’t be any cuts to Medicaid programs.” 

Johnson’s response wasn’t encouraging. 

“Medicaid is hugely problematic because it has a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse. Everybody knows that, we all know it intuitively. No one in here would disagree,” Johnson said, claiming that experts say that the Medicaid program has $50 billion in fraud. 

“Everybody is committed to preserving Medicare benefits for those who desperately need it and deserve it and qualify for it. What we’re talking about is rooting out the fraud, waste, and abuse,” Johnson added. 

Johnson was echoed by Republican Representative Nick LaLota, who told CNN Tuesday morning that Social Security and Medicare were off the table in the House’s budget talks but that Medicaid “was a subject for discussion,” claiming that undocumented immigrants—whom he called “illegals”—needed to be taken off the rolls. LaLota added that work requirements for Medicaid were also needed and that waste, fraud, and abuse within the program needed to be curbed.   

Johnson’s and LaLota’s comments seem to indicate that cuts are coming to a program popular on both sides of the aisle. While House Republicans seem to be trying to downplay any such cuts, claiming that Medicare and Social Security will be largely left intact, the fact that they can’t say the same for Medicaid doesn’t bode well, especially since Donald Trump has already endorsed sweeping cuts to the program. There may soon be a backlash to the GOP’s budget when it gets released. 

Montana women could soon be unable to receive abortion care anywhere.

A new bill sponsored by state Representative Kerri Seekins-Crowe would ban “abortion trafficking” across state lines, effectively criminalizing anyone who receives or helps someone receive the medical procedure, even if they access it outside of Montana.

“A person commits the offense of abortion trafficking if the person purposely or knowingly transports or aids or assists another person in transporting an unborn child that is currently located in this state either to a location within this state or to a location outside of this state with the intent to obtain an abortion that is illegal in this state,” reads the text of Montana House Bill 609. Conviction could come with a sentence of up to five years in prison.

The bill seeks to restrict a woman’s ability to travel—similar to how Republicans have pushed to restrict minors’ ability to leave their state for gender-affirming care. It’s also unclear how local authorities would be able to identify people who had received abortions outside of the state, raising questions of whether state lawmakers would also push for a registry of pregnant Montanans.

“Had a bill like this been law at the time, I wouldn’t just be a grieving mother, I’d be a felon,” Anne Angus, a 35-year-old Montanan who received an abortion at 24 weeks in 2022, after her fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, told Jessica Valenti. Under H.B. 609, she would be in prison. “All for fleeing the state to give my son the compassion and dignity he deserved,” Angus said.

Democrats are currently mobilizing against the bill. “Beyond attacking Montana voters who voted decisively to protect abortion rights, state Republicans are once again abusing state legislatures as a testing ground for their most extreme policies,” Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee communications director Lauren Chou told The New Republic. “Voters across the country are watching as Republicans take an ax to their rights, and they won’t forget this when it’s time to head to the ballot box.”

In November, Montanans voted to enshrine abortion protections in their state constitution, but that hasn’t prevented conservative state lawmakers from continuing to chip away at the protection. Earlier this month, Republicans in the state legislature advanced House Bill 316, a fetal personhood bill that would confer constitutional rights to a fetus from the moment of its conception. The bill would also effectively nix in vitro fertilization access in the state and undermine abortion access, according to the Daily Montanan, though it will require the approval of two-thirds of the state legislature before being advanced to the ballot for Montanans to vote on.

But Montana’s recent anti-abortion legislation is just more moves in a multipronged attack on reproductive rights happening nationwide, despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans do not support such restrictions.

In Missouri, a similar effort to track women is underway. Missouri House Bill 807, called the “Save MO Babies Act,” is intended to target people “at risk for seeking abortion services” and to “reduce the number of preventable abortions.” If passed, the registry would start on July 1, 2026, and would be managed by the Maternal and Child Services division of the state’s Department of Social Services, according to the bill text. But the bill does not specify the scope and scale of such a registry, or exactly how “at risk” individuals would be identified.

Lacking access to abortion care has actually made pregnancies drastically less safe. In Texas, where abortion hasn’t been permitted despite the legislature’s medical emergency clause, sepsis rates have skyrocketed by as much as 50 percent for women who lost their pregnancies during the second trimester, according to an investigative analysis published last week by ProPublica.

That’s left women in the state, like Kate Cox, with few other options than to flee Texas for emergency care—a reality that could be stripped from the table for women in Montana.

A group of civil servants caught up in Elon Musk’s chain-saw massacre of the federal government resigned on Monday, choosing to leave their jobs rather than help the tech billionaire gut essential programs.

In a letter obtained by the Associated Press, 21 technologists at the U.S. Digital Service, lamely rebranded by Donald Trump as the U.S. DOGE Service, quit, issuing a warning about the inexperienced ideologues that Musk had brought in to spearhead his efforts to slash government spending.

According to the letter, at the beginning of the Trump administration staffers were subjected to intense questioning by Musk’s guest-badge-wearing minions, who probed them on their political beliefs and technical skills. “Several of these interviewers refused to identify themselves, asked questions about political loyalty, attempted to pit colleagues against each other, and demonstrated limited technical ability,” the letter states. “This process created significant security risks.”

Ironically, the U.S. Digital Service was launched a decade ago to make government programs more efficient. Now, however, Musk’s interlopers are only intent on doing their overlord’s bidding, which means firing staffers and gutting programs.

The departing staffers wrote that they objected to the dismissal of 40 of their colleagues earlier this month. “These highly skilled civil servants were working to modernize Social Security, veterans’ services, tax filing, health care, disaster relief, student aid, and other critical services,” the staffers wrote in the letter. “Their removal endangers millions of Americans who rely on these services every day. The sudden loss of their technology expertise makes critical systems and Americans’ data less safe.”

Of the 65 staffers who were absorbed into the Deparment of Government Efficiency’s efforts after the purge earlier this month, one-third have now left the organization.

“We will not use our skills as technologists to compromise core government systems, jeopardize Americans’ sensitive data, or dismantle critical public services,” the staffers wrote in the letter. “We will not lend our expertise to carry out or legitimize DOGE’s actions.

“We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations,” they wrote. “However, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments.”

DOGE now claims to have slashed government spending by an estimated $65 billion by targeting waste and fraud, but the group has still provided no evidence of actual fraud, just a wonky list of government contracts they’ve decided to end, which doesn’t always add up. Meanwhile, the government-wide layoffs directed by DOGE continued Tuesday, with the Office of Personnel Management eliminating its 40-person team that oversees sensitive employee data. Massive layoffs plus buyouts have amounted to the elimination of about 95,000 jobs, according to Reuters.