Key Biden-Obama-Clinton Allies Lead Lawfare Against Trump's Federal Funding Freeze

A US District Court judge out of Washington, DC, recently issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump Administration’s recent move to freeze federal grant disbursements.

Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump and his allies have been delivering on campaign promises of cutting bloat in Washington, issuing a “fork in the road” letter to employees last week urging them to resign from their positions and moving to shutter the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

One major group resisting Trump’s efforts has been Democracy Forward, which counts key Democratic Party operatives as board members — former Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain and notorious Democrat election lawyer Marc Elias. As board members, neither Klain nor Elias received financial compensation from the organization, per the organization’s latest tax filing.

Klain and former President Barack Obama were reportedly behind the ousting of Biden as the party’s nominee last summer, and Elias recently tried to overturn the results in the US Senate election in Pennsylvania where Republican Dave McCormick bested incumbent Democrat Bob Casey. Elias formerly served as a lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Democracy Forward’s tax filings also show a drastic increase in money raised in the last publicly available period, where 2023 receipts totaled over $12.3 million. That’s nearly double the receipts from the $6.1 million raised in the previous period.

Since the organization’s founding in 2017 as a response to Trump’s first term, receipts have predominantly been between $4 and $5 million. This uptick aligns with the timeline of public information being circulated about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, of which Democracy Forward sees itself as the antithesis.

Democracy Forward is the group behind the aforementioned lawsuit against Trump’s federal funding freeze, which was filed last month on behalf of the National Council of Nonprofits, the American Public Health Association, Main Street Alliance, and SAGE. Democracy Forward’s President and CEO is Skye Perryman, who was compensated over $330,000 dollars in 2023 per the group’s last available public tax filing.

The organization is ambitious and operates at a grandiose scale. They recently launched a new project called Civil Service Strong, led by Robert Schriver, the former Acting Director of the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) under the Biden Administration; he also served at the agency for over five years during the Obama Administration.

Schriver’s private sector work is a direct continuation of actions taken by the Biden OPM in 2024 to limit the power of Trump’s incoming federal appointees.

Schriver touted the work being done by his organization to “get resources” to federal employees during an appearance on MSNBC’s The ReidOut.

The resources highlighted by Civil Service Strong are a set of links to organizations aligned with their mission. One recently added resource comes from the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), which specifically instructs DOJ and FBI employees not to succumb to pressure to participate in political investigations, despite the agency's previous politicization of the January 6 investigation and the 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

Democracy Forward has also filed suits in collaboration with public sector employee unions AFGE and AFSCME against President Trump’s executive orders targeting the federal workforce, where career bureaucrats are famously difficult to fire.