The Trump administration has not fully complied with a court order pausing the freezing of foreign assistance grants and contracts, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali last week ordered the administration to allow the disbursement of U.S. foreign assistance after hearing claims from federal contractors challenging an executive order signed by President Donald Trump pausing nearly all foreign assistance.
Your comment about state authority make me just a little more hopeful…
On the other hand, Trump is already flaunting his ability to choke state resistance by withholding federal funding.
Outrageously unconstitutional but he already isn’t following the courts anyway. I wonder if there’s any way for states to work around that, since most blue states are net negative on federal funds.
Just stop paying up because he won’t comply with the freeze? Then use those funds to paper over the deficit?
In order to “just stop paying up” the states would have to convince their citizens and businesses to stop paying their Federal income taxes and payroll taxes, because that money goes directly to the Federal government without passing through the states’ control first.
As far as I can tell, the only part of the Federal budget revenue that flows through the states and therefore might be able to be blocked is small enough to fit in the “misc/other” slice on a pie chart.
Good point. But at the same time the states control a lot of bureaucracy around day-to-day civilian operations and vital records.
If the state doesn’t send birth and death certificates to the IRS, taxing gets a lot harder. They control the registration of corporate entities, and while I’m not an expert on corporate law, I assume they could cause problems restricting access to those.
There’s probably some creative, outside the box economic resistance as well that I don’t know enough to guess at. For example, taxes/tolls/fines targeting government vehicles? Cutting or up-charging state power/utilities to customs offices?