By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) -The Trump administration said on Thursday the Federal Emergency Management Agency had made more than $2.2 billion in payments to a group of states over the past three weeks, meaning it was in compliance with a judge’s order blocking an earlier sweeping pause of federal grants, loans and other financial aid.
U.S. District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island, ruled on April 4 that Republican President Donald Trump’s administration had violated his order because FEMA had halted disbursements since early February for a “manual review” of grants without any clear end date.
The administration on Thursday submitted to McConnell a list of payments FEMA made to the 22 states and the District of Columbia, whose Democratic attorneys general brought the case, since McConnell’s ruling. In a court filing, Justice Department lawyers said FEMA was already working to process the payments before the court’s order.
“Defendants respectfully submit that they have fully complied with the Court’s Order,” the government lawyers wrote.
The lawsuit is led by New York and Rhode Island. Other plaintiff states include California, Illinois and Massachusetts.
Since taking office on January 20, Trump has taken a flurry of executive actions aiming to overhaul everything from government spending to immigration enforcement to the government’s relationships with universities.
The administration faces more than 200 legal challenges to those policies, and Democrats and some legal observers say the administration has dragged its feet in complying with unfavorable judicial rulings.
The case before McConnell stemmed from a funding freeze first announced in a January 27 memo by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget that it rescinded after the litigation began.
McConnell, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, said in a March 6 order blocking the spending freeze that the Trump administration had “put itself above Congress” and undermined the separation of powers between branches of government.
Separately on Thursday, the Trump administration appealed a February 25 order also blocking the funding freeze by a judge in Washington, D.C.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis)
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