Who Is Judge Indira Talwani? Federal Judge Blocks Trump Administration’s Grant Cuts

A federal judge in Boston ruled Friday that the Trump administration cannot use an obscure regulatory provision to justify billions of dollars in federal funding cuts, delivering a win to a coalition of 23 states that had sued over the practice. U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani granted summary judgment barring the administration from relying on what’s known as the termination clause and denied the government’s motion to dismiss the case.

The states had argued the administration was using the clause, a provision tied to agency funding priorities,to cut grants spanning crime prevention, food security and scientific research, and warned it could be used to cancel both current and future federal grants nationwide. In her ruling, Talwani wrote that the administration’s reading of the clause “is not clearly supported by the text of the provision, runs counter to the regulatory scheme, receives no support in the rulemaking history, and would violate the Spending Clause’s requirement that conditions be imposed unambiguously.” She added elsewhere in her order that “the President and his allies cannot hold critical programs hostage to their personal whims and political ideologies.”

Government lawyers had urged Talwani to dismiss the case, calling it an “extraordinarily unusual lawsuit” and arguing that some of the grants at issue had already been terminated while the states’ concerns about future grants were too speculative to support a court order.

Who Talwani is

Talwani, 65, was born in Englewood, New Jersey, to immigrant parents, and earned her undergraduate degree from Radcliffe College at Harvard University before getting her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law in 1988. She clerked for U.S. District Judge Stanley Weigel in the Northern District of California before spending 15 years in private civil litigation practice in San Francisco and then Boston, eventually becoming a partner at the firm Segal Roitman.

President Barack Obama nominated her to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in September 2013, and the Senate confirmed her unanimously, 94-0, in May 2014. Her confirmation made her the first judge of Asian descent to sit on the federal bench in the First Circuit and just the second Article III federal judge of South Asian descent in the country. She’s been based at the John Joseph Moakley U.S. Courthouse in Boston since taking the bench.

A judge increasingly at the center of Trump-era litigation

Friday’s ruling is one of several high-profile decisions Talwani has issued, pushing back against Trump administration policy this year. Earlier this week, she granted Planned Parenthood a temporary restraining order blocking a provision of the Republican tax and spending package that would have cut Medicaid funding to health centers that also provide abortions, marking, at the time, the first instance of a federal judge limiting enforcement of any part of that law. She later converted that order into a longer-lasting injunction, writing that patients were likely to suffer “adverse health consequences” if funding were disrupted. She’s also presided over immigration-related litigation, including a case involving transgender asylum seekers that reached the Supreme Court on an emergency basis earlier this year.

Because Talwani sits in Boston, where a large share of coordinated multistate lawsuits against the administration have been filed, she’s emerged as one of a handful of federal judges whose rulings have repeatedly slowed or blocked administration funding and policy actions, a pattern likely to continue as more states and advocacy groups route similar challenges through her courtroom.