A federal judge in the District of Columbia temporarily blocked President Trump’s order to freeze as much as $3 trillion in federal grants and loans. The White House had said it was reviewing whether the funds were consistent with Trump’s priorities.

The president’s order, which many people first learned about less than 24 hours ago, created widespread confusion. It interrupted the flow of money today to health researchers, programs for early childhood education and state offices for Medicaid, the program that provides health care to millions of low-income Americans. Many nonprofits expressed fear that the pause could stop critical charity work.

The move was the president’s latest attempt to purge the government of what he calls “woke” ideology. “The use of federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies is a waste of taxpayer dollars,” read the White Houses memo announcing the freeze.

The judge placed a hold on Trump’s order in response to a lawsuit filed by Democracy Forward, a liberal organization that argued that the directive violated the First Amendment and a law governing how executive orders are to be rolled out.

The freeze came days after the president also put a broad hold on foreign aid, forcing some organizations in Ukraine to suspend their operations and disrupting the distribution of H.I.V. drugs. My colleague Edward Wong, a diplomatic correspondent, said that leaders of aid organizations told him that they had “never seen anything as sweeping as this suspension of U.S. aid.”

It’s not unusual for presidents to hold back on some federal spending. But Trump has employed a flood-the-zone strategy in part to overwhelm the opposition, and if the freeze becomes permanent for a program that Congress has approved but that the White House does not like, it could set off a potential Supreme Court battle.