Judge rules the White House failed to comply with court order

A federal judge said Monday that the White House had defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants, marking the first time a judge has expressly declared that the Trump administration is disobeying a judicial mandate.

The ruling by Judge John J. McConnell Jr. in Rhode Island federal court ordered administration officials to comply with what the judge called “the plain text” of an ruling he issued on Jan. 29.

That order, he wrote, was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance.”

Shortly after Monday’s ruling, Trump administration lawyers appealed the judge’s initial order to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, asking the appellate court to pause McConnell’s order to keep federal funds flowing while their case was being considered. The White House responded with more defiance.

“Each executive order will hold up in court because every action of the Trump-Vance administration is completely lawful,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson. “Any legal challenge against it is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people.”

The legal actions on Monday marked a step toward what could evolve quickly into a high-stakes showdown between the executive and judicial branches, a day after Vice President JD Vance claimed in a social media post that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Fields’ statement suggested that the president would ultimately prevail in court, but neither he nor the Justice Department explained what the White House would do in the meantime. It appeared that the administration was trying to win through the legal system’s established procedures, even as officials questioned the legitimacy of those procedures from the outside.

To that end, some of President Donald Trump’s supporters accused the judges ruling against Trump of overstepping their authority.

“Activist judges must stop illegally meddling with the president’s Article II powers,” wrote Mike Davis, who heads the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy group.

The Democratic attorneys general driving much of the legal pushback pressed their position.

“No administration is above the law,” Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, said in a statement shortly after Monday’s order. “The Trump administration must fully comply with the court’s order.”

Already, more than 40 lawsuits have been filed challenging Trump’s moves, which have included revoking birthright citizenship and giving Elon Musk’s teams access to sensitive Treasury Department payment systems.

Judges have made preliminary rulings that those two executive actions, the funding freeze and other orders may violate existing statutes. On Monday, federal judges maintained a steady flow of challenges to Trump’s authority, temporarily blocking the Trump administration from reducing health research grants and maintaining a stay on efforts to coax federal employees to quit.

The question looming over Washington is, how Trump will respond.

“It’s very rare for a president not to comply with an order,” said Victoria Nourse, the director of the Georgetown Law Center on Congress and Democracy, who was formerly Joe Biden’s general counsel during his years as vice president. “This is part of a pattern where President Trump appears to be asserting authority that he doesn’t have.”

McConnell had previously ordered the White House to unfreeze federal funds locked up by the White House budget office. A memo from that office had demanded that billions of dollars in grants be held back until they were determined to be in compliance with Trump’s priorities and ideological agenda.

On Friday, 22 Democratic attorneys general went to McConnell to accuse the White House of failing to comply with his earlier order. The Justice Department responded in a filing on Sunday that money for clean energy projects and transportation infrastructure, allocated to states by the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, was exempt from the initial order because it had been paused under a different memo.

McConnell’s ruling on Monday explicitly rejected that argument.

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