A federal judge in Rhode Island has sided with a coalition of domestic violence support groups in momentarily barring the federal government from enforcing a newly imposed set of restraints on Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) grants.
Senior District Judge William E. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island issued his 27-page ruling on Friday, Aug. 8, granting the preliminary stay requested by the plaintiffs — an assembly of 17 state-level coalitions who work with domestic violence and sexual assault survivors. Rhode Island Coalition Against Domestic Violence is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The preliminary stay halts the Office on Violence Against Women, an agency within the U.S. Department of Justice which distributes the VAWA grants, from instituting conditions the agency was set to apply to grant applications starting Tuesday, Aug. 12. The funding policy change would require grant applicants to align their projects and services with President Donald Trump’s wide-ranging directives to discontinue federal funding of DEI and what the administration calls “gender ideology.”
“This order is a critical step toward protecting survivors and ensuring that communities across the country can continue to provide the services Congress mandated,” the plaintiffs said in a joint statement issued Friday. “The administration’s attempt to politicize essential funding that supports survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault was not just unlawful, it was cruel.”
The plaintiffs’ legal team included attorneys from Democracy Forward, the ACLU of Rhode Island, the National Women’s Law Center, the Lawyers’ Committee for Rhode Island, and Daniel Jacobson, a former counsel for the U.S. Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration, and now head of Jacobson Lawyers Group.
Jacobson and Democracy Forward’s Kristen Bateman made their case during a July 29 hearing before Smith, arguing that the Office on Violence Against Women violated the Administrative Procedure Act by unlawfully instituting the new funding conditions.
The organizations who rely on these funds, the attorneys argued, would see their work imperiled if they had to forgo federal funding critical to their operations. Applicants also had to certify adherence with the new restrictions, which attorneys argued could trigger future federal prosecution under the False Claims Act.
Smith agreed in his ruling that the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on at least one of their Administrative Procedure Act claims. There was not enough evidence for the court to conclude whether or not the restrictions are fundamentally invalid, Smith wrote. But, the judge argued, administrative law is designed to provide clear reasoning for the actions taken by federal agencies — something absent in the office’s adoption of the new funding conditions.
“The Court understands that this matter arises on an expedited basis, and perhaps a fuller administrative record will disclose more of the Office’s decisionmaking process,” Smith wrote. “But on the present record, the Court can only conclude that the Office engaged in a wholly under-reasoned and arbitrary process.”
Smith’s ruling returned several times to a court document he had discussed at the July 29 hearing: a declaration from Ginger Baran Lyons, the deputy director of the Office on Violence Against Women, that was filed on behalf of the federal government’s case.
“The Office provides, as the only basis for its decision, a single declaration by an Office supervisory official,” Smith wrote. “While helpful, that declaration is not a substitute for an administrative record.”
During the hearing, Smith noted that Lyons’ declaration painted a vastly different landscape of how her office would interpret the new funding conditions, compared to the conditions’ actual language. Smith underlined that disconnect in his ruling, writing that the plaintiff groups would only find “cold comfort” in the agency’s reassurance that it would not treat survivors of violence differently than it has in the past.
“In the context of this case and the present Administration,” Smith wrote, “the words of President Ronald Reagan have never rang more true: ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.’”
Smith was also unmoved by the feds’ arguments that the office “would be ‘unlikely to recover the grant funds once they are disbursed,’” and that “the public . . . has an interest in the judiciary respecting the Executive Branch’s ability to lawfully direct and guide agencies’ spending decisions.”
The relief sought by the coalitions, Smith noted, did not require any disbursement of grant funds, just a shift in the conditions attached to them.
“And speaking of respect,” Smith added, “the public has an interest in the Executive respecting the Legislature’s spending decisions.”
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
