'The government failed': Trump-appointed judge rips his spending cuts in late-night ruling
U.S. President Donald Trump arrives for a presentation of the Commander-in-Chief trophy to the U.S. Navy Midshipmen football team of the United States Naval Academy, at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 15, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump's administration suffered a loss in court — this time, at the hands of one of his own appointed judges.
Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney tweeted Tuesday that U.S. District Judge Mary S. McElroy, who Trump appointed to the District of Rhode Island in 2019, authored a ruling that overruled his funding freeze for multiple federal agencies. In her 63-page ruling, McElroy granted a preliminary injunction in favor of a coalition of nonprofit organizations suing the Trump administration allowing them to have their funding turned back on while litigation plays out.
"The judiciary does not and cannot decide whether [Trump's] policies are sound," she wrote. "But where the federal courts are constitutionally required to weigh in — meaning we, by law, have no choice but to do so — are cases 'about the procedure' (or lack thereof) that the Government follows in trying to enact those policies."
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McElroy said the plaintiffs correctly sued the administration under the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), under an argument that federal money already appropriated by Congress during former President Joe Biden's administration by law had to go to its designated payees. She noted that while "elections have consequences" and administrations have a right to implement their own policies, they don't have the right to shut off money after Congress put it in legislation that was signed into law.
"Agencies do not have unlimited authority to further a President’s agenda, nor do they have unfettered power to hamstring in perpetuity two statutes passed by Congress during the previous administration," she wrote.
The Trump-appointed judge additionally quoted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, saying he "put it best" when he wrote: "Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes famously wrote that 'men must turn square corners when they deal with the Government.' But it is also true, particularly when so much is at stake, that the Government should turn square corners in dealing with the people."
"Here, the Government failed to do so," McElroy wrote in her ruling.
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Click here to read Judge McElroy's full ruling.
