Judge Ali Strikes Down FEMA's Election Conditions on Anti-Terrorism Grants, Weeks Before the Midterms
On Monday, Sept. 28, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment to six cities and counties — including Nashville, Harris County (TX), Columbus, Dallas County, El Paso County, and Travis County — holding that DHS and FEMA acted unlawfully by conditioning Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) anti-terrorism funds on election-administration changes, with roughly $200 million and 20% of grants at stake for non-complying jurisdictions. The struck-down conditions would have forced localities to screen registered voters with DHS's SAVE database, conduct 5% manual audits of paper ballots, and replace QR/barcode-counted ballots with hand-marked paper ballots — the same SAVE system the Supreme Court just revived for voter checks (see SAVE Voter-Citizenship Database: Opposition Briefed at SCOTUS as Ruling Looms).
The court held: "[T]he statute gives FEMA the authority to fund projects proposed by states and high-risk urban areas; it does not give FEMA authority to use the possibility of grants to induce states or high-risk urban areas to carry out the federal government's preferred projects at their own expense1."
And per the opinion as quoted by All Rise News: "Congress did not authorize the grant program to be used for the sort of election administration reforms FEMA demands here2 — changes that, whether sound or not as a matter of policy, are not advanced to prepare for or respond to 'acts of terrorism,'" U.S. District Judge Amir Ali wrote in a 24-page opinion.
Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin: "The court agreed that holding public safety funding hostage to force the president's agenda is dangerous and illegal. Under our laws, states and localities control our elections, and today's ruling reaffirms that."
What it means: This is the local-government companion to the states' FEMA 3.0 wins (see Twenty-Six States Sue to Block Trump Administration's "FEMA 3.0" Election and Immigration Funding Conditions and Local Governments Join States in Suing FEMA Over Coercive Election and Immigration Funding Conditions) — another judicial reversal of the administration's grant-conditioning strategy, this one landing five weeks before the Nov. 3 midterms and directly protecting local election-administration autonomy. It closes off one of the executive's remaining non-litigious paths into election machinery: attaching election rules to public-safety money. The open question is whether DOJ/DHS appeals to the D.C. Circuit — a registered watch tracks that.
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An instance of Federal grant money cannot be held hostage to unrelated policy demands. — Election-administration demands attached to anti-terrorism funding exceeded the statute's purpose and the agencies' authority. ↩︎
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An instance of Federal disaster relief grants cannot be conditioned on unrelated partisan policy compliance. — Anti-terrorism grants cannot be held hostage to election overhauls — public-safety funding severed from unrelated policy compliance weeks before the midterms. ↩︎