Scrambling to respond to the Trump administration’s late Monday night directive to pause a wide, but as-yet-unspecified, swath of federal spending programs, California’s Democratic elected officials and agency heads offered two consistent responses today:
- We don’t know what this means yet and;
- It’s almost definitely illegal.
Leading the charge out of Sacramento is Attorney General Rob Bonta who, along with 22 other Democratic state attorneys general, filed a fresh lawsuit challenging the ordered funding freeze and asking a court to block it from going into effect.
“This directive is unprecedented in scope and would be devastating if implemented,” Bonta said in a statement.
A host of nonprofit organizations filed suit prior to the state attorneys general, prompting a federal judge to put a temporary hold on the funding freeze minutes before it was scheduled to go into effect. The judge called it a “brief administrative stay” to maintain the status quo through Friday while court challenges proceed.
The chaos began Monday evening when, in a two-page memo, the president’s acting director of the Office of Management and Budget ordered federal agencies to “temporarily pause” all financial assistance that could be “implicated” by any of the president’s prior executive orders. Since taking office just more than a week ago, President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of edicts to remake federal policy and governance.