Billions in federal funds still inaccessible, says emergency motion filed in R.I. federal court
by Nancy Lavin, Rhode Island Current
Which is why 23 Democratic attorneys general suing Donald Trump and his administration are asking for a federal judge in Rhode Island to intervene. The 21-page motion filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island late Friday afternoon asks Chief Judge John McConnell Jr. for emergency, immediate enforcement of his existing order blocking a federal funding freeze.
McConnell issued the temporary restraining order on Jan. 31, preventing Trump and other federal cabinet heads from blocking access to funds until further notice.
But across the country, state governments, including Rhode Island, remain locked out of payment systems and other portals controlling billions of federal funding, the AGs wrote in their latest filing.
“There has been an ever-changing kaleidoscope of federal financial assistance that has been suspended, deleted, in transit, under review, and more since entry of the Order,” the filing states. “These conditions persist today.”
The AGs filing continues, “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.”
In court documents submitted Feb. 3, Daniel Schwei, the U.S. Department of Justice attorney representing the Trump administration, wrote that the administration did not interpret the temporary restraining order to apply to Trump’s executive orders or to federal agencies not named in the lawsuit. Schwei also indicated federal funds allocated through Biden-era programs under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act were not subject to the court order.
This has put key environmental, research, health care and infrastructure programs at risk, as the AGs write in their latest request for emergency enforcement. In Rhode Island, the Rhode Island Office of Energy Resources (OER) has been unable to access $125 million in federal grants for various energy efficiency and renewable energy incentives, some of which were frozen starting Jan. 27, according to a supplemental, 78-page document submitted Friday. As of Wednesday, OER has not heard back on its Jan. 28 email regarding the suspending funding for solar incentives, the AGs wrote.
Robert Beadle, a spokesperson for OER, confirmed the frozen funds in an email Friday evening.
“OER is working with the Governor’s Office and the Attorney General’s Office to resolve this issue in light of the Temporary Restraining Order,” Beadle said.
Meanwhile, Brown University has experienced “near immediate disruptions” to its research projects, including a canceled review of $71 million in National Institutes of Health funding for dementia research, according to court documents.
“As long as this Administration continues to break the law, we will continue our fight to uphold it,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, who is co-leading the lawsuit, said in a statement Friday. “Let me be as crystal clear as Judge McConnell’s order: we’re not interested in playing these games, especially when it comes to funding programs that Americans rely on to survive and thrive.”
McConnell has given the DOJ team representing the Trump administration until Sunday to respond, according to court documents.
In his response filed Sunday, Schwei said the Trump administration has made “good-faith, diligent efforts to comply with the injunction.”
He acknowledged that 600 federal payment requests remained under review out of 7,000 flagged via the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) payment management system. Meanwhile, other agencies, including the Department of Energy, are conducting reviews of all payment requests to ensure funding is being distributed appropriately, he said.
Schwei added the grant for Brown University’s School of Public Health remains available, even if advisory committee review meetings have been canceled by the National Institutes of Health.
McConnell has separately scheduled a hearing in federal court in Providence on Feb. 21 to hear arguments on the AGs’ request for a longer term and more broad-sweeping block on a funding freeze.
On Monday, a federal judge in D.C. issued a temporary restraining order blocking the funding freeze in response to a separate lawsuit filed by nonprofit and business groups.
This story has been updated to include Sunday’s DOJ response.
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