AP News53%
Federal judge bars Trump administration from using obscure clause to make huge funding cuts 81%
By Michael Casey13%
7/17/2026, 11:05:58 PM
Keywords: Indira Talwani, Lawsuits, United States Government, Boston, United States, Trump Hub, Trump Lawsuits, Massachusetts, Doge Trump Administration Lawsuit Congress, Politics, Barack Obama, Subsidies, Donald Trump, Legal Proceedings, Government Budgets, Jennifer Davenport, U S Office Of Management And Budget
BS Summary: This article contains 16 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Pessimism Bias, and Straw Man, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 32.4% saturation with 154 hits. Analysis detected 807 faulty-reasoning hits from 476 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 72.5% and a BS Rank of 81% (4,224 of 21,886 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 80.70% of the article peer group.
BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Boston on Friday ruled the Trump administration can’t use an obscure clause relating to agency priorities to make billions of dollars in funding cuts.
Twenty-three states had a filed a lawsuit last year accusing the administration of using the clause to make cuts to everything from crime prevention to food security to scientific research.
They were concerned that it would be used to cancel current and future grants.
U.S.
District Judge Indira Talwani granted a summary judgment preventing the administration from relying on the clause to make cuts and denied a motion by the government to dismiss the case.
“Defendants’ interpretation of the Termination Clause is not clearly supported by the text of the provision, runs counter to the regulatory scheme, receives no support in the rulemaking history, and would violate the Spending Clause’s requirement that conditions be imposed unambiguously,” Talwani, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, wrote.
The lawsuit argued that the Office of Management and Budget promulgated the use of the clause in question to justify what it described as a “nationwide slash-and-burn campaign.”
The clause, which was first introduced in 2020 and revised in 2024, says federal agents can terminate a grant if the award “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”
The states argued that the language, put in place during the Biden administration, was for the first time being used to terminate grants.
“Instead of working with us to keep the public safe and lower costs for hardworking New Jerseyans, the Trump Administration has recklessly and illegally gutted federal funding to public safety, disaster preparedness, scientific research, clean water, and more,” New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport said in a statement.
“The President and his allies cannot hold critical programs hostage to their personal whims and political ideologies, destabilizing the country by yanking essential federal funding that was already awarded to the states.”
Calling the case an “extraordinarily unusual lawsuit,” lawyers for federal government argued it should be dismissed because some of those grants have already been terminated and plaintiffs’ argument about the impact to future grants was far too speculative.
They also accused the states of “raising blanket, undifferentiated objections” to the termination of thousands of grants without seeking relief that would “restore a single grant."
“That mismatch between the allegedly unlawful agency ‘decision’ on one hand, and the amorphous relief requested in this suit, on the other, creates a set of jurisdiction and justiciability defects that doom this lawsuit at the threshold,” lawyers wrote in the motion to dismiss.
“The federal government called the litigation an “extraordinarily unusual lawsuit” and accused the states of “raising blanket, undifferentiated objections” to the termination of thousands of grants without seeking relief that would “restore a single grant."
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