A federal judge on Monday blocked several of President Donald Trump’s executive orders that have threatened federal funding to nonprofits that primarily service LGBTQ+ communities.
District Judge Jon Tigar in Oakland, California, issued a preliminary injunction halting three of Trump’s anti-DEI and anti-transgender executive orders. Nine nonprofits around the country, including the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, had sued the Trump administration, calling its actions unconstitutional.
“While the Executive requires some degree of freedom to implement its political agenda, it is still bound by the Constitution. And even in the context of federal subsidies, it cannot weaponize Congressionally appropriated funds to single out protected communities for disfavored treatment or suppress ideas that it does not like or has deemed dangerous,” Tigar wrote in the order.
Hard-won queer rights are under attack. HuffPost remains committed to standing with the LGBTQ+ community. Support our work by joining our membership program today.
The federal government therefore cannot withhold funding from grant recipients if they continue programs that promote diversity or service transgender people. The order will remain in effect nationwide while the case continues, and Trump administration’s lawyers are likely to appeal.
On Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order announcing the federal government would only recognize “two sexes, male and female,” and barred the promotion of “gender ideology,” a right-wing term used to refer to the existence of transgender people and their rights. Shortly after he also signed two orders directing agencies to terminate federal funding for all diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Almost immediately, nonprofit organizations saw that their contracts, totaling hundreds of thousands and, in some cases, millions of dollars in federal funding, were being canceled.
On April 22, the Department of Justice informed FORGE, a Wisconsin-based nonprofit that provides training and support to crime victims, that it was terminating a $749,000 grant to update its toolkit to support transgender survivors of sexual assault.
The very next day, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notified the Los Angeles LGBT Center, another plaintiff in the suit, that it was terminating a $1 million grant to study new strategies to mitigate the spread of sexually transmitted infections among all populations, but specifically including gay and bisexual men and transgender women, court documents show.
“All of [these organizations] have lost funding because they serve trans people and BIPOC people … For some of these groups, the amount of the budget they are losing is almost 50% of their budget. These are people who do things like give people their HIV meds, feed people, house people,” Kevin Jennings, the chief executive officer of Lambda Legal, an LGBTQ legal advocacy group, told HuffPost ahead of the order.
“So let’s be really clear about what the bottom line of these cuts is. People will die. People don’t have any place to live, don’t have a place to live, adequate nutrition. We consider this a life and death lawsuit,” he added.
Over the last six months, advocacy groups have sounded the alarms as Trump has leveraged executive orders to withhold federal funding from universities, nonprofits and medical institutions that specifically service people of color and transgender communities and to scrub federal websites that include data, research, history on those groups.
Already, HIV advocates worry that the Trump administration’s cuts to the CDC and termination of hundreds of federal research grants on treatment and prevention has reversed the momentum of the decadeslong fight to end the epidemic.