Welcome to the NewsHour. Today, a federal judge said that President Donald Trump violated his order that lifted a blanket freeze on federal spending and again directed the administration to release the funds.

That as top prosecutors in nearly half the country just won a temporary legal victory restoring medical research funding stripped late last week.

White House correspondent Laura Brone Lopez joins us now for more.

So Laura, we're three weeks into the Trump administration.

You're seeing a growing number of federal judges describe the president's actions as overreach.

What more did federal judges say about Mr. Trump's attempts to free some of those federal funds?

So on that sweeping freeze of federal funding, District Judge John McConnell said in a ruling

today that the Trump administration's continued freeze of those funds, quote, violate the plain

text of an order that he previously issued saying that they needed to stop and that they needed

to release all of those

funds. And Judge McConnell called Trump's actions, quote, likely unconstitutional and said that the

freeze continues to, quote, cause irreparable harm to much of the country. Now, he didn't hold

any government officials in contempt, criminal contempt, but hinted that he might in the future if they violate

this order.

And he specifically ordered the administration to stop freezing money for the infrastructure

law, for the Inflation Reduction Act, those are Biden-era laws, as well as said that

the administration needed to release funding for the National Institutes of Health.

So the big question here, Omna, is does the Trump administration comply with this judge's order?

I asked the White House.

They didn't answer that question.

And there's some suggestions from people like Vice President Pence as well as Elon Musk that they think that the administration should defy the court orders.

You mentioned the National Institutes of Health or NIH.

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