The Line Courts Are Actually Drawing

"They can sue us and maybe they'll win, but we're not giving money to sanctuary cities anymore."

We’re not going to pay them anymore. They are sanctuary for criminals. — Donald Trump

The president said it in January, and it states the constitutional standoff more plainly than any legal brief: he expects to lose in court and intends to proceed anyway. Six months later, the courts have indeed ruled — and the administration has indeed proceeded. But the rulings themselves reveal something sharper than a blanket judicial resistance to executive power. The line the judiciary is drawing is specific, and it runs through Congress's exclusive authority to direct federal spending. The most recent ruling came from Judge Indira Talwani, who last week blocked the administration from using a "Termination Clause" to revoke more than $5 billion in already-awarded federal grants. The Office of Management and Budget, she found, lacked the authority to cancel grants based on post-award priorities — and in doing so violated the Spending Clause, which reserves the power of the purse to Congress ^[1]. The constitutional logic connecting the rulings is cumulative. In May, Judge Colleen McMahon ruled that the Department of Government Efficiency's mass termination of more than 1,400 National Endowment for the Humanities grants — totaling over $100 million — was unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination under the First Amendment ^[2]. DOGE staffers Justin Fox and Nathan Cavanaugh had testified under oath that they used ChatGPT to scan grant descriptions for keywords like "LGBTQ," "BIPOC," and "gender fluidity" to identify grants for termination without reviewing their scholarly substance ^[3]. The mechanism the administration used to identify targets was unconstitutional, Judge McMahon ruled, and she rejected the government's attempt to blame the AI.

The government cannot escape liability for DOGE’s work by scapegoating ChatGPT. — Judge Colleen McMahon

Earlier, Judge Stephanie Gallagher reached the same constitutional conclusion about the Education Department's DEI funding restrictions, calling them "textbook viewpoint discrimination" under the First Amendment ^[4]. The administration dropped its appeal. Then there is the equal-protection dimension. Judge Amit Mehta ruled in January that the administration illegally canceled $7.6 billion in clean energy grants based on political affiliation, finding the terminations were made "primarily — if not exclusively" because awardees resided in states that voted for Harris in 2024 ^[5].

Defendants freely admit that they made grant-termination decisions primarily — if not exclusively — based on whether the awardee resided in a state whose citizens voted for President Trump in 2024. — Amit Mehta

The First Circuit added its own weight in March, unanimously upholding an injunction blocking the administration's freeze of trillions in federal loans and grants. The court found OMB acted "arbitrary and capriciously," and New York Attorney General Letitia James said the president "cannot treat congressionally-approved funding like a switch he can flip on and off" ^[6]. Taken together, the rulings form a coherent constitutional architecture: the Spending Clause bars the executive from canceling grants Congress authorized; the First Amendment bars it from conditioning funding on ideological alignment; the Fifth Amendment bars it from distributing funds based on the political complexion of a recipient's state. The mechanism — administrative termination clauses and AI-driven keyword screening — is new, but the constitutional violation each court identified is old. What makes this line visible rather than merely a pattern of losses is what the same judiciary has permitted elsewhere. In the same term, the Supreme Court expanded presidential removal authority in Trump v. Slaughter, overturning 90 years of precedent in a 6-3 ruling ^[7]. The Court upheld the termination of Temporary Protected Status for 336,000 people and allowed the transgender military ban to proceed ^[7]. And in April, Judge Michael Tostrud denied Minnesota's request to block a $243 million Medicaid freeze, finding the deferral "likely complies with controlling federal regulations" because it had a genuine fraud-investigation basis rather than an ideological one ^[8].

Though Minnesota credibly complains that the federal government’s deferral is historically unprecedented in its size and timing, I conclude on this record that the deferral likely complies with the controlling federal regulations. — Eric C. Tostrud

The contrast is the point. Courts are not uniformly resisting the administration. They are expanding executive power in personnel, immigration, and military policy — and they are blocking it specifically where the administration reaches into the Treasury to redirect money Congress already appropriated. The constitutional line is the power of the purse. The administration's response has been to adapt rather than comply. After courts blocked direct funding freezes, OMB pivoted to what it called a "data-gathering exercise" targeting 14 Democratic-led states, explicitly claiming it "does not involve withholding funds, and therefore does not violate any court order" ^[9].

They can sue us and maybe they’ll win, but we’re not giving money to sanctuary cities anymore. — Donald Trump

An AP review found the administration violated court orders in at least 31 lawsuits in its first 15 months, spanning mass layoffs, spending cuts, and the withholding of billions in foreign aid ^[10]. Justice Sotomayor warned that the Court's pattern of rewarding noncompliance with discretionary relief "further erodes respect for courts and for the rule of law" ^[10]. In Oregon, a state legislator introduced the Recourse Act, which would let the state withhold payments to the federal government if a court orders funding released and the president refuses to comply — a state-level response anticipating federal noncompliance ^[11]. The administration does sometimes retreat. It dropped its legal fight to freeze wind energy permitting after the First Circuit affirmed a ruling that the executive order was "arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful" ^[12]. It reversed the termination of nearly 2,000 SAMHSA mental health grants — totaling almost $2 billion — within 24 hours after bipartisan backlash ^[13]. But the pattern is not compliance; it is testing the boundary, retreating where the line is unmistakable, and finding workarounds where it is not. The real-world cost falls beneath the constitutional argument. A Center for Effective Philanthropy study found that 73% of nonprofits face rising demand while cutting staff, with 29,000 nonprofit jobs eliminated in a single year as the administration deployed funding freezes, grant terminations, and threats to tax-exempt status ^[14]. At the University of California alone, more than 1,000 research grants were terminated after keyword screenings flagged terms like "diversity" and "gender" ^[1]. The standoff's terms are set in courtrooms. Its price is paid by people who never filed suit.