Trump Loses Big As Judge Rules Federal Grants Can't Be Stripped In Retaliation

Federal District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that Trump violated the First Amendment rights of the American Bar Association by stripping federal grants from them as retaliation.

The Daily is journalism for the people from outside the Beltway. You can support our work by becoming a subscriber.

Trump Gets Called Out For One Of His Favorite Forms Of Retaliation

It has become the standard Trump administration excuse when the White House cancels grants or funding: the administration claims that the funding no longer aligns with its objectives or priorities.

The claim is nonsense, and it always has been.

The Trump administration stripped federal grants from the American Bar Association that helped to fund services to domestic and sexual violence victims after the association joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration.

The ABA sued, and today, they got a ruling in their favor.

Judge Cooper ruled:

The government claims that it had a nonretaliatory motive for terminating the grants: They no longer aligned with DOJ’s priorities. But the government has not identified any nonretaliatory DOJ priorities, much less explained why they were suddenly deemed inconsistent with the goals of the affected grants. And the government’s different treatment of other grantees suggests this justification is pretextual. DOJ did not terminate any other OVW grants, and, at oral argument, the government conceded that other grant recipients continue to conduct similar training functions with OVW money. Oral Arg. Tr. 31:4–12.

The government has offered no nonretaliatory explanation for why it continues to fund these other OVW grantees after terminating the ABA’s grants, or why these other grantees’ projects still effectuate DOJ’s priorities while the ABA’s do not. Finally, DOJ also purported to terminate two grants that, by their terms, had already ended, making it even less plausible that DOJ conducted an individualized analysis of whether each grant aligned with DOJ policy.

Based on all this, the Court cannot but conclude that the ABA is likely to succeed on its claim that Defendants terminated the agreements because of its protected activity in violation of the First Amendment.