EXPLAINER: Judge Ali frees more than $200 million in counterterrorism money FEMA had tied to the vote

The people who train for the worst

A dollar for the suspicious package

On September 28, federal judge Amir Ali struck down a 20% holdback on the money Washington sends states and cities to prepare for attacks.

Twenty cents on every dollar. In the name of election integrity, that is what FEMA, the federal emergency agency, wanted to keep. Until the states changed the way they vote.

That dollar has a precise use. According to the Brennan Center, the program was created after September 11, 2001. It helps local governments prevent attacks and respond to them.

You know what this money looks like without watching it being spent. A suspicious-package drill in a parking lot. A radio crackling during the simulation. Thick gloves pulled on too fast.

What Dallas County says

Dallas County Attorney John Creuzot puts it more simply in the Brennan Center release. This funding pays for the training and equipment of his county’s law enforcement. And of its rapid response teams.

Not ballots. Not printers. Not audits.

Twenty cents is little on a dollar. It is a lot on a training budget.

And yet this is the money FEMA had put its twenty-cent hold on.

A counterterrorism dollar has an address: the first responder.

Twenty cents on every dollar

June 2026, a funding notice

It all starts with an administrative document.

In June 2026, FEMA published its 2026 notice of funding opportunity for the Homeland Security Grant Program. According to the ruling, the notice holds back 20% of a state’s funds. According to the ruling, the holdback lasts until proof that five election conditions have been met.

Twenty cents per dollar, withheld for the vote.

One dollar in five. Frozen. Not eliminated, frozen.

The ruling puts a figure on the sum at stake. More than $200 million in grants are affected by the holdback.

From Congress to the counties

Where does the money come from? From Congress.

According to the judge, Congress generally appropriates $1 billion to $2 billion a year for the program. About $1 billion for 2026.

FEMA pays the states. The states must pass at least 80% on to local governments, under the law cited by the judge.

In other words, the holdback targeted the states on paper. In practice, it landed on the counties.

Holding it back from the state means depriving the county.

Five conditions for a check

FEMA’s list

The ruling reproduces the five conditions in full. Here they are, in plain terms.

A plan to abandon barcode or QR-code machines. In their place, hand-marked ballots.

A manual audit of 5% of ballots after the election. A reconciliation of the number of voters with the number of ballots.

Citizenship verification for everyone on the voter roll, through the federal SAVE system, within 120 days. The same check for every poll worker, vendors included.

August 10, the instructions

On August 10, 2026, FEMA spelled out the procedure in a memo. The judge struck that down too.

SAVE’s reliability is disputed, including in the senators’ letter cited below. This piece doesn’t revisit that.

Five conditions. Five overhauls. Machines, audits, checks, staff.

A hundred and twenty days to verify an entire voter roll. In the middle of an election year.

The question here is narrower. And heavier.

Who pays for these five changes, and with what money?

Five conditions, and the grant funds none of them.

The law’s own list

Eight named threats

The judge reads the law word for word. It lets FEMA help states deal with attacks. Prevent them. Prepare for them. Protect against them. Respond to them.

It also names the threats FEMA must weigh. Biological. Chemical. Cyber. Explosives. Incendiary. Nuclear. Radiological. Suicide bombers.

Eight threats. Not one ballot box.

The law adds “other types of threat” the agency deems relevant. That is the door the government tried to open.

A word and its neighbors

The judge answers with an old rule of interpretation: “a word is known by the company it keeps.”

So “other types of threat” means threats of the same nature as the first eight. Not any reform the agency considers useful.

The judge notes that the government presents its conditions as a way to strengthen election integrity. The judge also notes that it never explains how they reduce vulnerability to attacks.

The link is missing. The judge says so, and no more.

Eight threats in the law, and the ballot isn’t one of them.

On their own dime

The Dallas printers

Here is the heart of the mechanism. And the heart of the ruling.

The reforms demanded were not paid for by the grant. According to the judge, that point is not disputed. Counties and cities, or their states, had to fund them themselves.

Nobody else. Not even the government.

Dallas County put a figure on its share: $7.25 million in printing equipment, for the ballot-form condition alone. Travis County speaks of “significant costs” for the poll-worker condition.

Nashville, of additional staff and equipment.

The Harris County clerk’s office adds a timing problem. Its declaration is cited by the judge. With hand-marked ballots only, the county could not meet the counting deadlines in Texas law.

Pay to get paid

The mechanism fits in one sentence. To collect all of its counterterrorism money, a county first had to spend its own to overhaul its elections.

The law, the judge writes, does not authorize FEMA to withhold these grants until states achieve policy objectives “on their own dime.”

The cost had not disappeared. It had changed addresses.

Washington demanded. The county paid.

What the government argued

Election integrity

The government had a defense. It was not empty.

According to the ruling, it presented its conditions as a way to strengthen election integrity. Citizenship verification, it argued, ensures that only citizens vote.

The argument holds together. It targets the vote.

It argued that FEMA has broad discretion in the face of evolving threats to election infrastructure.

And the Department of Homeland Security has indeed designated election systems as critical infrastructure, the judge notes.

“Breathe a sigh of relief”

At the September 2 hearing, government lawyers also played down the urgency. The parties could, in their words, “breathe a sigh of relief.”

States would have 60 days to accept their grant. FEMA could extend that deadline. Jurisdictions would even have three years to comply, they argued.

Three years. But the twenty cents stayed withheld from day one.

A real defense. A missing link.

The longer the deadline, the longer the holdback.

No contract, 50 states

A contract that doesn’t exist

The government also tried to take the case out of the court’s hands.

It suggested the case belonged before the Court of Federal Claims, like a contract dispute. The judge replies that no grant has been awarded yet. So there is no contract.

There is no exclusive jurisdiction where there is no jurisdiction at all, he writes in substance.

The judge even notes that the government never firmly argues the point. It leaves it hanging.

All 50 states in the dock

The government then argued that every state concerned had to be joined to the lawsuit. All 50.

That is not a tight argument either, the judge replies.

No state intervened to defend these conditions, he notes. A state that wants to adopt them on its own remains free to do so.

Two exits. Two closed doors.

No contract, no escape hatch.

What the judge leaves standing

A laudable goal

It has to be said with the same precision: the judge does not condemn these reforms.

He writes that he is not judging the merit or importance of the election choices at issue. Election integrity, he says, may be a laudable goal.

A laudable goal is not a counterterrorism goal.

That is the whole distinction. The ruling faults neither the supporters of verification nor its opponents. It faults the tool.

The debate stays open. The tool falls.

I’ll admit it: I don’t know whether verification through SAVE is a good idea. This file doesn’t let me decide. I only know that first responders’ money was not appropriated for that.

The 3% that stays

Something else stays standing. The funding notice requires recipients to spend at least 3% of their grants on the physical and cyber security of elections.

That minimum was not challenged. It is not struck down.

Locks. Shatterproof glass. Alarms. Protection against denial-of-service attacks. Those are FEMA’s own examples, cited by the judge.

And yet the same document that protected the ballot box also wanted to remake it, at the counties’ expense.

Protecting the polling place is not rewriting the ballot.

Two days before the payouts

September 30

Here is the number that gives the ruling its weight.

According to the judge, FEMA had not yet paid out any 2026 grants. It had to do so by September 30.

The ruling came on the 28th.

Two days.

Not two months. Not two seasons. Two days.

The twenty cents, at the window

Without this ruling, twenty cents of every dollar would have gone out withheld. And Dallas County would have faced a $7.25 million printer bill to get them back.

The plaintiffs had asked for expedited proceedings for that reason. They feared, according to the judge, being unable to carry out these conditions in time. The elections are in November.

Dallas County’s elections administrator even considered it impossible to equip and train its workers before the end of the 2027 election cycle.

The clerk has been ordered to close the case.

A case closed, forty-eight hours from the payout window.

Forty-eight hours between a holdback and a full check.

Six counties and cities

Three states, one lawsuit

The plaintiffs come from Tennessee, Texas and Ohio. Nashville and Davidson County. Harris, El Paso, Travis and Dallas counties. The city of Columbus.

They sued the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA in August, according to UPI.

“Nashville knows how to run secure elections,” says its law director, Tyler Yarbro, in the Brennan Center release.

Harris County Attorney Abbie Kamin calls withholding public safety money to force the president’s agenda “dangerous and illegal.”

El Paso County Attorney Christina Sanchez calls it “reckless” to have tied counterterrorism money to a verification system. A system she calls unproven.

No political strings

Columbus City Attorney Zach Klein says the funding will now arrive “with no political strings attached, as Congress intended.”

Travis County Attorney Delia Garza says Washington cannot run over the law to strong-arm cities and counties.

Dallas’s county attorney, for his part, speaks of a “collective sigh of relief.” On September 2, the government was already promising a sigh. It was not the same one.

According to CNBC, America’s urban areas vote overwhelmingly Democratic. The ruling says not a word about it.

The judge doesn’t talk about parties. He talks about a law and what it pays for.

Counties won against an agency, not against a party.

34 senators, the same day

The letter to Markwayne Mullin

On that same September 28, 34 senators wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

They demand that FEMA’s election conditions be rescinded. They demand that all withheld funds be released to the states. They demand evidence for a July 17 claim by Mullin: 250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states.

According to them, these conditions were even applied retroactively to funds already awarded for 2025.

According to The Hill, Mullin had first spoken of 16,000 noncitizens illegally registered in Nevada. Other department officials later revised that figure to 185.

No Republican signature

The list of signatories includes Democrats and two independents, Angus King and Bernie Sanders. No Republicans.

That detail matters. A rule on counterterrorism money should worry both parties equally.

And yet the defense of the counties came from only one side of the aisle.

According to UPI, Trump repeatedly claims without evidence that U.S. elections are riddled with fraud.

The letter also cites a whistleblower. According to that person, immigration services staff were allegedly directed to use personal data to access voter registration websites. The senators refer to an “Unlawful Voter Initiative.”

These are allegations. The letter presents them as such.

Two hundred fifty thousand, in four states. And if the same revision awaited that figure…

Sixteen thousand, then 185: the evidence is still to come.

The same doctrine as for tariffs

Major questions

The judge adds a third argument. It comes from the Supreme Court.

It is the major questions doctrine. An agency claims a power of vast economic and political reach? It must show clear authorization from Congress.

Here, the judge writes, the issue is the very way elections are run. And hundreds of millions of dollars.

A ruling from February 20, 2026

To back it up, he cites Learning Resources v. Trump.

According to SCOTUSblog, the ruling is dated February 20, 2026. Six justices to three. The emergency economic powers law does not authorize the president to impose tariffs.

A Canadian reader will recognize the reasoning. The same doctrine that brought down tariffs brings down an election holdback.

Tariffs. A holdback. The same brake.

The judge adds, finally, that a spending condition must be reasonably related to the purpose of the spending. Here, it is not.

The government replied that this limit applies to Congress, not the executive. “That argument is self-defeating,” the judge writes. If the spending power belongs to Congress, the executive cannot wield it alone.

Without clear text from Congress, the agency has no such power.

What is still undecided

No permanent injunction

The ruling has its limits. They have to be read.

The judge vacates the conditions and the 20% holdback. But he denies the permanent injunction the plaintiffs sought. Vacatur is enough, he writes.

He specifies that the vacatur applies beyond the plaintiffs alone. That is the ordinary rule, in his view, when an agency rule is found unlawful.

He also sides with the government on one point. The plaintiffs’ claim of action beyond legal authority falls, because the administrative route was enough for them. One point. Only one.

Five unknowns

CNBC asked the Justice Department, which represented FEMA and Homeland Security, for comment. No response had been published in its article.

Nobody knows yet whether the government will appeal. Whether FEMA will pay out full grants on September 30. Whether the 2025 funds will be released. Whether Information Bulletins 569 and 569(a), targeted by the senators, will fall too. Whether Mullin will produce evidence for his 250,000.

Five unknowns. One ruling.

According to the Brennan Center, these election policies had already failed by executive order and in Congress. Why go through counterterrorism money this time?

Winning a ruling doesn’t fill the check.

September 30, at the window

What the number meant

Twenty cents on every dollar. More than $200 million in all. A $7.25 million printer bill in a single county.

This was not a debate about voter fraud. It was a shifted bill, from Washington to the counties, paid with first responders’ money.

The judge didn’t say it in those words. He said it more drily: no reform imposed at someone else’s expense.

Two days later

On September 30, will FEMA pay the states full grants, or will it wait for an appeals court to give it back its twenty cents?

Somewhere, a team is preparing its next drill. It doesn’t yet know with what budget.

The radio crackles. The gloves wait.

The twenty cents come back, untied from the vote.

Sources:

Primary Sources:

• U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — Judge Amir Ali’s opinion, Nashville v. DHS, September 28, 2026
• U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — order vacating the conditions and the 20% holdback, September 28, 2026
• Senate Homeland Security Committee (minority) — letter from 34 senators to Markwayne Mullin, September 28, 2026

Secondary Sources:

• Brennan Center — plaintiffs’ release after the ruling, September 28, 2026
• UPI — FEMA cannot withhold counterterrorism money, September 28, 2026
• CNBC — the link between counterterrorism funds and election rules struck down, September 28, 2026