A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration overstepped its authority by tying counterterrorism grant money to changes in how states run their elections.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali, in a 24-page opinion issued Monday, found that local election offices cannot be forced to “self-fund the various election administration reforms” that the Department of Homeland Security wanted in exchange for full grant payments.
“The conditions relating to election administration issues,” Ali wrote, “fall well outside of preparing for or responding to ‘acts of terrorism.'”
Ali, an appointee of President Joe Biden who serves on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, laid out how the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates under DHS, distributes grant money to state and local governments based on their exposure to terrorism threats and how effectively they plan to use the funds. Congress signed off on that arrangement.
The dispute centers on two programs, the Urban Area Security Initiative and the State Homeland Security Grant Program, both of which were reshaped in June when FEMA issued a Notice of Funding Opportunity, or NOFO, that tied funding to “how states administer their elections.”
According to the ruling, the notice required states and certain high-risk urban areas to make specific changes to routine election procedures, touching on everything from ballot design to auditing and reconciliation practices to who qualifies as an eligible voter or poll worker.
Governments that refused to comply stood to lose 20% of their grant funding, a cut that could total hundreds of millions of dollars nationwide.
A group of local governments, among them Columbus, Ohio, and Nashville, Tennessee, sued over the policy, arguing DHS had gone beyond what Congress ever authorized it to do.
Ali agreed with them.
“By authorizing FEMA to prioritize among different uses of grants proposed by states and high-risk urban areas, Congress in no way authorized FEMA to withhold grant funds to achieve the federal government’s policy ends at state and local expense,” he wrote.
Congress gave FEMA the power to fund projects, the judge explained, not to pressure states and urban areas into carrying out federal priorities on their own dime, a cost he noted would likely be significant. “Yet extracting the federal government’s preferred reforms at the state or high-risk urban area’s expense is exactly what FEMA did here,” he wrote.
Ali drove the point home again later in the opinion, writing that Congress never authorized the grant program to be used for the kind of election administration changes FEMA was demanding, regardless of whether those changes might be good policy, since they weren’t tied to preparing for or responding to actual acts of terrorism.
The judge stressed that his ruling doesn’t weigh in on whether DHS’s proposed election changes were wise or whether the local governments’ objections to them held merit. His focus, he said, was strictly on whether Congress had given the agency the authority to impose them, and he concluded it hadn’t.
With that, Ali struck down the funding notice’s election administration requirements along with the 20% holdback tied to them.
