Friday, March 7

ON THE DOCKET THIS WEEK

• Courts continue to rebuff Trump over funding freezes
• “We are effectively flying blind:” Election officials describe impact of cuts to cybersecurity agency
• How Trump’s bid to take over the Postal Service could threaten mail voting

TRUMP ACCOUNTABILITY

Courts continue to rebuff Trump over funding freezes

The Trump administration suffered several key court losses this week, as a federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against some of the White House’s drastic actions.

In a pivotal 5-4 vote on Wednesday, SCOTUS rejected the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower-court order requiring the government to unfreeze over $1.5 billion in foreign aid owed to nonprofits and government partners for their humanitarian efforts with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The court’s order was in response to a lawsuit filed by a global health group, an AIDS/HIV relief organization and a nonprofit journalism network challenging President Donald Trump’s day-one executive order to halt all foreign assistance for 90 days. The case is the second to reach the Supreme Court over Trump’s executive orders, but it is the first to involve impoundment — the claim that the president can unilaterally withhold or block funding that has been appropriated by Congress.

Though SCOTUS’ ruling is a devastating blow for the Trump administration, it’s not the end of the legal saga. In denying Trump’s request, SCOTUS asked the D.C. District Court to clarify what the government’s obligations are, though the lower court’s order to release the funds remains in effect. A hearing was held Thursday for the plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction. The judge presiding over the case — Washington D.C. District Court Judge Amir Ali — had twice ordered the Trump administration to unlock the frozen foreign aid. Read more about SCOTUS’ rejection of the Trump administration’s USAID freeze here.

Meanwhile a federal judge ruled in favor of dozens of states, finding that Trump’s massive federal funding freeze in late January encroached upon Congress’s power of the purse. The judge ordered federal agencies through a preliminary injunction to disburse any remaining frozen funds and prohibited the Trump administration from freezing appropriated federal funds in the future.

In a scathing ruling, District Chief Judge John McConnell said that the Trump administration, by issuing the freeze, “put itself above Congress.”

“It imposed a categorical mandate on the spending of congressionally appropriated and obligated funds without regard to Congress’s authority to control spending,” wrote McConnell, an appointee of former President Barack Obama. Read more about how Trump’s funding freeze violated the separations of power here.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

CISA

“We are effectively flying blind:” Election officials describe impact of cuts to cybersecurity agency

Ever since Trump’s victory in November, election officials at every level and voting rights advocates have worried that he would gut CISA — the little-known federal agency responsible for the nation’s cybersecurity and protecting critical infrastructure from digital threats. And now that those cuts have come to fruition, election officials are already experiencing the loss of crucial CISA resources they said are integral to voting security.

“My issue is that we may lose one of the most vital services that actually kept us safe in 2024 and kept our elections moving, even with all the disruptions that we could have had,” Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) told Democracy Docket. “CISA provided a whole host of services, including the [Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center (EI-ISAC)], which is an information exchange space. And they provided physical and cyber security agents… who physically went out and did inspections at all of our county election offices in the state of Arizona.”

With the help of CISA, Fontes’ office led state-wide training and tabletop scenarios for election officials to help them prepare for all manners of election-related threats — including AI disinformation efforts from foreign adversaries — ahead of the election last year. All of the training and roleplaying exercises prior to the election proved necessary and effective: On Election Day, 10 counties in Arizona were targeted by Russian bomb hoaxes.

“The reason we had almost no disruptions was because CISA helped us figure out how to deal with these sorts of things,” Fontes said. “And they helped us train our people so that we could very seamlessly address each of the issues as they arose, which we did.”

But with the cuts to CISA, Fontes is worried about how that will make future elections less secure — including the state’s upcoming local elections this year. And so is Santa Fe, NM, County Clerk Katharine Clark (D), who is concerned about how the diminished role of CISA will affect local elections she’s running this year.

“Just in the last election, I felt like we were really coordinated, we worked with our law enforcement and there was that sort of acceptance and recognition that elections are critical infrastructure,” she said. “Now that we’re rolling back those resources, we are not going to see that emphasis anymore.” Read more about how the cuts to CISA are impacting election officials here.

USPS

How Trump’s bid to take over the Postal Service could threaten mail voting

Among the many drastic, radical proposals Trump is threatening is one that may have flown under the radar amid the flurry of news: a takeover of the United States Postal Service via executive order.

This is concerning for several reasons, for starters the USPS is an independent agency and absorbing it into his administration would dissolve the service’s leadership. And this could have a devastating effect on voting in the country, as it could make Trump directly involved in the effectiveness of mail-in voting — something the president has repeatedly said he’d like to end.

This, of course, has voting rights advocates sounding the alarm.

“Taking over the Postal Service just kind of opens up a whole Pandora’s box of mischief,” said Barbara Smith Warner, the executive director of National Vote at Home Institute, a nonprofit which works to increase voters’ access to and confidence in mail voting. “This is a way that the federal government could put a really big thumb on the scale and impact every state’s ability to run their own elections.”

Jake Grumbach, an associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, told Democracy Docket that the order is a clear continuation of his administration’s goal to snuff out structural or independence within the executive branch.

“This certainly seems like a move you’d want to take if you wanted more executive control over the postal service in order to do more political things with it, one of which could be affecting the distribution of mail ballots,” Grumbach said. Read more about how Trump’s potential takeover of the USPS would affect mail-in voting here.

OPINION

Republicans Prove There Was a Big Catch About ‘Leaving Abortion to the States’

NEW VIDEO

Republicans Target Student Voters in Montana and Indiana

What We’re Doing

Among the more disastrous and consequential actions of the Trump administration is the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — the faux agency headed by billionaire Elon Musk (or maybe not?) that’s dismantling the federal workforce, agency by agency. To say that DOGE is having a profound impact on tens of thousands of federal workers would be an understatement.

And the worst part is that people can’t even tell Musk directly how his actions are affecting their lives. Or can they? The Intercept recently discovered Musk’s official DOGE email address and are in a FOIA fight to gain access to his communications. It would be a damn shame if people flooded Musk’s email to tell them what they think about DOGE, wouldn’t it?