6 times judges blocked Trump executive orders – Fox News
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Haywood Talcove, who will be a witness at the DOGE congressional hearing, joined ‘Fox & Friends’ to discuss how wasteful government spending soared in recent years and what action can be taken to mitigate the surge.
Federal judges have blocked President Donald Trump’s executive orders related to stemming the flow of illegal immigration, as well as slimming the federal bureaucracy and slashing government waste.
“Billions of Dollars of FRAUD, WASTE, AND ABUSE, has already been found in the investigation of our incompetently run Government,” Trump wrote on TRUTH Social on Tuesday. “Now certain activists and highly political judges want us to slow down, or stop. Losing this momentum will be very detrimental to finding the TRUTH, which is turning out to be a disaster for those involved in running our Government. Much left to find. No Excuses!!!”
Judges in U.S. district courts – the lowest level in the three-tier federal court system – have mostly pushed back on Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency. Here are the six times judges have blocked Trump’s executive orders so far:
AS DEMOCRATS REGROUP OUTSIDE DC, GOP ATTORNEYS GENERAL ADOPT NEW PLAYBOOK TO DEFEND TRUMP AGENDA
President Donald Trump listens as Elon Musk speaks in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The Trump administration quickly pushed to withhold Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) money sent to New York City to house migrants, saying it had “significant concerns” about the spending under a program appropriated by Congress. The Justice Department had previously asked the appeals court to let it implement sweeping pauses on federal grants and loans, calling the lower court order to keep promised money flowing “intolerable judicial overreach.”
McConnell, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, is presiding over a lawsuit from nearly two dozen Democratic states filed after the administration issued a memo purporting to halt all federals grants and loans, worth trillions of dollars.
“The broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds is, as the Court found, likely unconstitutional,” McConnell wrote, “and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country.”
The administration has since rescinded that memo, but McConnell found Monday that not all federal grants and loans had been restored. He was the first judge to find that the administration had disobeyed a court order.
The Democratic attorneys general allege money for things like early childhood education, pollution reduction and HIV prevention research remained tied up even after McConnell ordered the administration on Jan. 31 to “immediately take every step necessary” to unfreeze federal grants and loans. The judge also said his order blocked the administration from cutting billions of dollars in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
The Boston-based First Circuit Court of Appeal on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration’s effort to reinstate a sweeping pause on federal funding.
The federal appeals court said it expected U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island to clarify his initial order.
U.S. District Judge Jeannette A. Vargas, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, on Monday ordered lawyers to meet and confer over any changes needed to an order issued early Saturday by another Manhattan judge, Obama-appointee Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, that banned Elon Musk’s DOGE team from accessing Treasury Department records. Vargas instructed both sides to file written arguments if an agreement was not reached.
The order was amended on Tuesday to allow Senate-confirmed political appointees access to the information, while special government employees, including Musk, are still prohibited from accessing the Treasury Department’s payment system.
On Friday, 19 Democrat attorneys general, including New York Attorney General Letitia James, sued Trump on the grounds that Musk’s DOGE team was composed of “political appointees” who should not have access to Treasury records handled by “civil servants” specially trained to protect sensitive information like Social Security and bank account numbers.
Justice Department attorneys from Washington and New York told Vargas in a filing on Sunday that the ban was unconstitutional and a “remarkable intrusion on the Executive Branch” that must be immediately reversed. They said there was no basis for distinguishing between “civil servants” and “political appointees.”
Elon Musk, chair of the newly announced Department of Government
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