President Trump, upon taking office, issued a series of executive orders claiming to pause or terminate over a trillion dollars in congressionally appropriated funding for programs created by the Inflation Reduction Act. In furtherance of these orders, federal agencies began terminating entire grant programs en masse, including the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program. This program funded vital environmental programs, such as natural disaster prevention and response programs, interventions against childhood lead exposure, and asbestos abatement.

Several grant recipients, including municipalities, nonprofits, and tribal governments, challenged the administration’s actions in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, bringing both statutory and constitutional claims. The district court denied the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and granted the federal government’s motion to dismiss the case. The plaintiffs appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In November 2025, CAC filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs-appellants, explaining why the D.C. Circuit should reverse the district court, with a particular focus on the district court’s erroneous dismissal of the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims. Our brief made three main points.

First, the Constitution’s separation of powers prohibits the President from unilaterally withholding federal funds based on disagreement with congressional policy. The text, history, and structure of the Appropriations and Spending Clauses all demonstrate that Congress has the exclusive power of the purse. Specifically, the Spending Clause grants Congress the sweeping power to spend for the “common Defence and general Welfare of the United States,” while the Appropriations Clause limits executive authority over finances by stating that “[n]o Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”  These provisions were crafted in response to the English monarch’s abuse of the purse strings. And since the Founding, all three branches of government have consistently interpreted them, alongside structural separation-of-powers principles, to bar unilateral executive withholding of appropriated funding.

Second, because the Trump administration unilaterally terminated a mandatory grant program, the executive branch violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. Rather than engage in any meaningful analysis of plaintiffs’ separation-of-powers claim, the district court concluded that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dalton v. Specter required it to dismiss it. That was wrong. Although Dalton held that the particular constitutional claim in that case was really just a claim that the President had exceeded the unbridled discretion granted by a statute, the Dalton decision also made clear that other executive actions in excess of statutory authority may still give rise to actionable constitutional claims, including when the President acts in violation of the Constitution by exercising a power not delegated to him, or one expressly delegated to another branch. In this case, the root of the district court’s error was interpreting Dalton’s holding that “all executive actions in excess of statutory authority” are not “ipso facto unconstitutional,” to mean that no executive action in excess of statutory authority may ever give rise to an actionable constitutional claim. To the extent that the district court relied on the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Global Health Council v. Trump for that syllogism, it erred in doing so. Global Health Council is distinguishable, and because the panel majority’s analysis of Dalton was deeply flawed, it should not be extended beyond the facts of that case.

Third, if the district court’s reading of Dalton were endorsed by the D.C. Circuit, it would have staggering implications. The President could escape liability for a constitutional claim simply by pointing to some statutory provision that dubiously authorized his conduct. Worse still, executive branch defendants could transform a plaintiff’s allegation of statutory violations into a defense to any constitutional claim arising out of the same course of conduct. That is the scenario that should give the D.C. Circuit pause, not that an accurate reading of Dalton will open the floodgates to statutory claims disguised as constitutional ones. Dalton itself ensures that a claim that the President merely acted “in excess” of statutorily delegated discretion—without also violating the Constitution by usurping another branch’s power—may not be recast as a constitutional claim. That restriction applies to a vast array of challenges to agency actions, from arbitrary-and-capricious review under the Administrative Procedure Act to petitions for review of agency decisions under the National Environmental Policy Act. But it does not allow executive branch officials to avoid answering to separation-of-powers allegations whenever their acts violate both the Constitution and a statute.