A federal judge drops the HAMMER on Donald Trump by ruling that he must secure funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or risk violating a court order.

And it gets even better for the American people...

"Neither the statute, the injunction, nor the Fed's willingness to pay has changed; the only new circumstance is the administration's determination to eliminate an agency created by Congress with the stroke of pen, even while the matter is before the Court of Appeals,” U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson wrote.

The judge ruled that the CFPB must continue to request funding and the Federal Reserve in turn must provide that funding using its "combined earnings" even in situations where the Fed's interest expenses are greater than its earnings.

In other words, funding the CFPB - a crucial watchdog agency that advocates for average Americans against encroaching corporate exploitation - must be treated as a funding priority. Destroying the agency has been a objective of the Republicans since it was established because their party's entire raison dêtre is entrenching corporate power and funneling more wealth to the rich. If hardworking Americans get taken advantage of and fleeced in the process, they couldn't care less.

The judge's decision comes as a crushing defeat to Trump's Justice Department which was attempting to use the novel argument that there are simply no funds available to fund the CFPB. Trump has been trying to throttle funding to cripple and destroy the agency because formally eliminating it would take an act of Congress.

Judge Jackson correctly suggested that the White House "manufactured" the funding shortage for the CFPB in order to justify a "unilateral decision" to circumvent her previous ruling that they must support the continued existence of the agency. She dismissed the attempt as not "valid."

“It appears that defendants' new understanding of ‘combined earnings' is an unsupported and transparent attempt to starve the CPFB of funding and yet another attempt to achieve the very end the Court's injunction was put in place to prevent,” Jackson stated.