The Trump administration issued a series of executive orders directing agencies to withhold federal funds from sanctuary jurisdictions—localities that decline to participate in federal civil immigration enforcement. The President made clear that this threatened withdrawal of funding was designed to force these localities into submission, leaving them with no choice but to implement his immigration agenda. 

Several counties and cities that faced a loss of federal funding challenged the administration’s actions in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The district court preliminarily enjoined the administration’s unlawful actions, but the defendants asked the court to dismiss the case on various grounds, including that the plaintiffs’ separation-of-powers and Spending Clause claims are unreviewable under the Supreme Court’s 1994 decision in Dalton v. Specter.  

In October 2025, CAC filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs, urging the court to deny the pending motion to dismiss. Our brief made two main points. 

First, the Constitution’s separation of powers prohibits the President from refusing to spend federal funds to further his own policies. 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, Dalton v. Specter does not bar the plaintiffs’ separation-of-powers and Spending Clause claims premised on the President’s unconstitutional withholding of federal funds. The defendants misread 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 is ever unconstitutional. Yet Dalton itself makes clear that plaintiffs may bring a constitutional challenge whenever the President violates the Constitution—including when, to use Dalton’s language, there is “a want of [Presidential] power” rather than “a mere excess or abuse of discretion in exerting a power given.” The plaintiffs here allege such a want of power—namely, that Congress has not authorized the President to withhold federal funding from sanctuary jurisdictions or otherwise imposed such a funding condition itself—and thus have a viable constitutional claim that President Trump’s efforts to do so unilaterally usurped one of Congress’s exclusive powers. That makes this case comparable to Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, the archetypal separation-of-powers case, and not Dalton, our brief explained.

In January 2026, the district court denied the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss. Agreeing with the interpretation of Dalton laid out in our brief, the court ruled that despite the Trump administration’s invocation of Dalton in its motion to dismiss, the plaintiffs had “plausibly alleged that their separation of powers claim is a constitutional argument.”