UPDATE (Feb. 12, 2025, 9:33 a.m. ET): A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration’s bid to halt a Rhode Island district court judge’s ruling that blocked the federal funds freeze. This latest loss for the administration is not the final word in the case as litigation continues.
What happens if the Trump administration defies court orders? The question is top of mind these days, after statements from Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance broadly raised the possibility. On Monday, we got the beginnings of an answer to the question of how the courts might push back if judges believe their orders aren’t being followed.
That answer came in litigation over the administration’s federal funds freeze, where a Rhode Island judge previously issued a temporary restraining order against the government. The plaintiff states who brought the case subsequently told the federal district’s chief judge, in a motion to enforce the order, that they “continue to be denied access to federal funds.” The government defendants opposed the motion, saying they had made “good-faith, diligent efforts to comply with the injunction across the broad spectrum of Federal financial assistance implicated by the Court’s Order.”
Siding with the states, Judge John McConnell issued an order on Monday granting the enforcement motion. The Obama appointee wrote that the government defendants had violated his “clear and unambiguous” order and that the states presented evidence that the government has “continued to improperly freeze federal funds and refused to resume disbursement of appropriated federal funds.” He ordered the defendants to immediately restore frozen funds.
Naturally, the question arises, what happens if they don’t? The judge seemed to answer the question somewhat obliquely at the very beginning of his written order, where he quoted from a Supreme Court case about a lawyer being held in contempt. Putting an emphasis on a line from the case that said “all orders and judgments of courts must be complied with promptly,” McConnell went on to quote from the high court ruling: “Persons who make private determinations of the law and refuse to obey an order generally risk criminal contempt even if the order is ultimately ruled incorrect.”
So, is contempt really a possibility? McConnell suggested so, but we’ll see what happens if there isn’t clear compliance according to the judge. Of course, as we saw in a different Donald Trump context, namely his criminal trial where he serially violated a court order and faced no significant penalty for doing so, the existence of a court order and a finding that someone violated it is only as useful as the penalty imposed. In the meantime, the government wants to take the matter out of the trial judge’s hands. After McConnell’s order came down on Monday, the government filed a notice of appeal saying it’s challenging the restraining order as well as the order granting the motion to enforce it at the federal appeals court, which is one step below the Supreme Court. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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