Trump’s Federal Worker “Buyout” Hits Yet Another Legal Hurdle

Last month, the Office of Management and Budget issued a two-page memo ordering a pause on all “disbursement of all federal financial assistance.” The budget freeze, which would affect more than 2,600 accounts across the government, sent the public sector into a frenzy. The memo was rescinded the next day, but the Trump administration maintained the freeze was still in place, which led to even more confusion and anxiety.

Despite last month’s court order, Democratic attorneys general from 22 different states warned that millions of federal funds, the majority of which came from the IRA and the IIJA, were still on hold. The states urged McConnell to enforce the TRO.

“While it is imaginable that a certain amount of machinery would need to be re-tooled in order to undo the breadth of the Federal Funding Freeze, there is no world in which these scattershot outages, which as of this writing impact billions of dollars in federal funding across the Plaintiff States, can constitute compliance with this Court’s Order,” they wrote in an emergency motion Friday.