California, like Ukraine, caught in Trump’s traps

From sanctuary cities to highway funds, state familiar with threats to yank federal money

Long before President Donald Trump raised alarm by halting hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid in an alleged effort to influence Ukraine, his administration had built up plenty of practice in using federal funds to punish a favorite target: California.

The Justice Department said it would deny criminal justice grants to sanctuary cities that don’t assist immigration agents, a move that several lower courts have blocked. The Department of Transportation is moving to cancel a $929 million grant to California’s high-speed rail project and may try to claw back an additional $2.5 billion the bullet train program already has received.

And the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday that if California didn’t improve its air quality, the feds would withhold billions in federal highway funding — a move that Gov. Gavin Newsom called a “threat of pure retaliation” against a state that has sued the Trump administration 60 times.

Since he took over as president, Trump has used his power over federal funds as a cudgel to push cities, states and foreign governments to do what he wants.

“The threat of withdrawing federal funding is not a new tactic,” said Michael McConnell, a Stanford law professor. “But President Trump has tended to personalize the threats more than prior administrations.”

And the actions that have prompted threats of funding clawbacks range from momentous to minuscule. Earlier this month, the Trump administration threatened to withdraw federal funding for a Middle East studies course at Duke University and the University of North Carolina over its depictions of Christianity and Judaism.

But now what appears to be another move to block federal funds approved by Congress

has sparked a full-blown political firestorm. Trump’s decision to freeze nearly $400 million in U.S. aid to Ukraine before urging the country’s president to investigate one of his political rivals has led to the threat of impeachment looming over his presidency.

Trump also has pushed legal boundaries on the use of federal funds in other ways, experts say. After Congress declined to approve funding for a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, Trump declared a national emergency to move funds from the Defense Department for wall construction. And he considered freezing more than $4 billion in aid to foreign countries last month before deciding not

to amid political backlash.

Trump has long painted himself as a master dealer in the business world, making his willingness to drive a tough bargain central to his image as a successful real estate mogul. But between court decisions blocking some of his funding moves and the crisis over Ukraine, he’s found that those tactics don’t necessarily translate as well in a government setting.

Trump is far from the only president to use similar tactics. The Constitution gives the power to appropriate federal funds to Congress, but in many cases, that power is delegated to the president and the executive branch.

Presidents have used foreign aid as a carrot or a stick to extract diplomatic commitments and reforms from foreign governments. And it’s also been used domestically:

Barack Obama’s administration, for example, threatened to block federal funds for states that discriminated against Planned Parenthood and didn’t allow transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice, although it never actually did so.

Still, Trump has used federal funds as leverage more often, more brazenly and in ways that have pushed the legal envelope more than past presidents, legal experts say.

What sets the Ukraine example apart — and potentially makes it so perilous for Trump — is that he allegedly was acting to damage a potential 2020 rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, not to change policy.

“What’s especially concerning about the Ukraine example is he seems to do it not just for public policy ends but for his own personal,

political ends,” said Michael Dorf, a Cornell Law School professor who focuses on constitutional law.

Trump has insisted that he acted appropriately and was not drawing a quidpro-quo between federal aid and Ukraine digging into Biden, and he blasted the whistleblower who made the call public.

“I want to know who’s the person that gave the whistleblower the information, because that’s close to a spy,” Trump said at a closed-door meeting Thursday at the United Nations, The New York Times reported. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? With spies and treason, right? We used to handle them a little differently than we do now.”

Republicans pointed out that the record of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President

Volodymyr Zelensky released by the White House did not directly mention the aid funds the president had temporarily frozen — although the document notes that it is “not a verbatim transcript.”

Many of Trump’s threats about federal funding haven’t gone further than tweets. In February 2017, soon after taking office, he suggested he could cut off federal money to UC Berkeley after the university called off a speech by right-wing activist Milo Yiannopoulos amid violent protests.

The high-speed rail line is one example where the Trump administration has moved to take back federal money. In yanking back federal funds, the Department of Transportation argued that the state has failed to follow through with its plan for the bullet train project, which has been marred by extensive budget overruns and delays. But Democratic leaders in the state have claimed that Trump acted out of animus for the state, targeting it for political reasons.

Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley Law School, argued that Trump’s apparent solicitation of help from a foreign government for information that could damage a political rival was in and of itself a violation of federal law, whether or not he implied a connection with U.S. aid to Ukraine.

But he said Trump’s broader history of using federal money as a political tool was a dangerous trend: “Congress has to set the strings on grants, not the president.”