After two months of legal wrangling, a federal appellate court confirmed Thursday that, yes, the executive branch may indeed withhold payments not appropriated by Congress. The abrupt tone of their ruling signaled that this legal conclusion should be obvious. A district court’s errant rulings suggest that it is not.
The controversy endangered what Mary Szoch, director of FRC’s Center for Human Dignity, described as “one of the great accomplishments of the Big Beautiful Bill: defunding Planned Parenthood” for one year. On July 3, an appropriations bill passed by Congress prohibited federal Medicaid funding from going to any organization that “provides for abortions.”
Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson described the provision as a “targeted attack on Planned Parenthood,” which received $792.2 million in taxpayer funding in 2024 and committed 402,230 abortions, according to their annual report released in May. U.S. taxpayers contributed 39% of Planned Parenthood’s operating budget for the year, more than any other source.
It didn’t take long for liberal activists to strike back. On July 7, the very next business day after a holiday weekend, Planned Parenthood sued to challenge the law in the federal District of Massachusetts.
Choosing this jurisdiction stacked the deck in Planned Parenthood’s favor, since all 11 full-time judges in the District of Massachusetts (excluding those on senior status) were appointed by Democratic presidents. Appeals from Massachusetts go to the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, where all five full-time (not senior status) judges on the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit were appointed by Democratic presidents.
Within hours of Planned Parenthood filing its motion, Judge Indira Talwani issued a 14-day temporary restraining order (TRO), requiring the Trump administration to keep Medicaid funds flowing to Planned Parenthood. Talwani provided no legal basis for this instant order because, if truth be told, there was none.
Thus, the law Congress passed stayed in effect for less than one business day. “Imagine the level of arrogance it must take for a judge to believe that her personal beliefs trump the power given to Congress in the Constitution,” Szoch responded. “The people’s representatives voted for this measure — in fact, a large portion of the legislature wanted to defund Planned Parenthood for 10 years, not just one. But this lone federal judge thinks she has the power to wipe away the will of the people.”
On July 21, as the TRO was set to expire, Talwani replaced it with a preliminary injunction, which had the same effect of requiring the executive branch to continue dispensing taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood, in open violation of the terms of the law passed by Congress.
This time, Talwani at least attempted to grasp for a rationale that would justify her politically motivated conclusion. In a 36-page order, she claimed that the law violated the free speech rights of Planned Parenthood affiliates. Attempts do not always result in success.
Perhaps Talwani recognized the hollowness of her argument, because a week later she issued a second preliminary injunction, substantially similar to the first. The difference was that she had beefed up her order to 58 pages by adding a second argument: the appropriations law acted as a “bill of attainder” (a law designed to punish a person or group without trial) against Planned Parenthood and was therefore unconstitutional.
In response, the Trump administration appealed to the First Circuit. “Halting federal subsidies bears no resemblance to the punishments — including death, banishment, and imprisonment — previously understood as implicating the [Bills of Attainder] Clause,” it argued. “Taxpayer funds should not be used to subsidize certain entities that practice abortion — conduct that many Americans find morally abhorrent.”
In a September 11 order, a three-judge panel of the First Circuit stayed both preliminary injunctions, allowing the Trump administration to withhold taxpayer funding from abortion businesses pending appeal.
The panel dismissed Talwani’s tortured arguments with devastating brevity. “Notwithstanding the contrary conclusion reached by the district court after its careful consideration of the matter, we conclude that defendants have met their burden to show their entitlement to a stay of the preliminary injunctions pending the disposition of their appeals of the same,” they wrote, in the single substantive sentence of a three-paragraph opinion.
One detects a note of sarcasm in the phrase “careful consideration.” Talwani’s arguments were so manifestly marshalled piecemeal to defend a predetermined outcome that the appellate court did her the honor of ignoring her reasoning completely, and without comment.
The verdict was apparently unanimous, as no dissent was registered to the unsigned order. The case was heard by Circuit Judges Gustavo Gelpí, Lara Montecalvo, and Seth Aframe, all appointed by President Joe Biden.
It’s a beautiful thing when the U.S. government works as it was intended. The legislative branch, which is most accountable to the people, has the authority to pass laws, in particular laws that determine how public money should be spent. The executive branch is tasked with faithfully executing laws passed by Congress, which includes not spending money Congress has not appropriated. The judicial branch has no veto power over such spending decisions; its role is merely to adjudicate cases and controversies in line with the Constitution. And when a single district judge gets out over her skis and usurps legislative prerogatives — well, that’s what the appeals process is really for, isn’t it?
Sometimes, the various organs of the U.S. government do work as intended. Sometimes, the constitutional requirements are so clear that even ideology and partisan leanings do not affect the outcome. Sometimes, when a Republican majority in Congress finally works up the courage to defund Planned Parenthood, even a trio of Biden-appointed judges based in New England and Puerto Rico have to agree they have the authority.
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