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1 1 (May 2, 2025)

handle is hein.crs/cladevepwe0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional ______ **Research Service ~~~ i~~nforming the legislative debate since 1914 __________________ Congressional and Executive Power Over Spending: Selected Recent Litigation May 2, 2025 On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued the first group in a series of executive orders that seek to align past and future federal spending decisions with the new Administration's policy priorities. The first Legal Sidebar in this series summarizes the range of policy issues the executive orders address as well as the spectrum of spending issues that they implicate. This Sidebar is the second in the series and seeks to contextualize recent executive actions affecting federal spending by examining Congress and the executive's respective roles in controlling and administering federal funding. It examines three separate legal challenges to executive actions affecting federal spending that are currently pending in various federal courts. Building on the previous Sidebar's examination of general principles governing appropriations and spending, this Sidebar looks at how several courts have applied those principles, at least preliminarily. These cases are New York v. Trump, AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition v. US. Department of State, and California v. US. Department of Education. These three cases represent a small subset of the many challenges to recent executive spending decisions and remain ongoing. The early written decisions in these cases may offer guidance, however, as to how courts are applying relevant legal principles and thus how Congress might analyze these issues when considering ways to confirm or limit recent executive branch decisions. New York v. Trump On January 27, 2025, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued OMB memorandum M-25-13 which required that, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance. The next day, New York led a group of 22 states and the District of Columbia in filing suit in federal court in Rhode Island challenging the legality of this directive. The states initially made five separate legal claims in their lawsuit. They alleged that the funding freeze violates: (1) the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), because agencies have no authority to impose a government-wide pause on federal awards without regard to the individual authorizing statutes, regulations, and terms that govern each funding stream; (2) the APA, because the OMB directive was arbitrary and capricious because it lacked a reasoned basis for the pause; (3) the Constitution's Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB11303 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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