The administration clarified Tuesday afternoon that Medicaid and Head Start were not programs intended to be affected by the directive.

Attorney General Kathy Jennings said she had joined the lawsuit to make sure that Delawareans and the state of Delaware are protected, taken care of and not cut off from necessary federal funding.

“This order was callous, craven and careless,” Jennings said. “The White House is toying with people’s lives and livelihoods — including millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump. We’re not going to stand by and wait to see what kind of havoc the president wants to wreak.”

Delaware Health and Human Services Secretary Josette Manning told a state Senate committee Wednesday that her agency is going through each division, identifying programs that get federal funding and determining priorities. She said hundreds of positions are federally funded and the department draws down $10 to $20 million from the federal government every week.

“For instance, one of the programs, LIHEAP, which is the low-income heat and energy program, is 100% federally funded,” she said. “If that program’s cut, that’s about $750,000 a month that we as a state would have to consider in order to continue to provide those services.”

McBride, along with Sens. Chris Coons and Lisa Blunt Rochester, spent Tuesday talking with nonprofits who were wracked with fear and worry about possible financial devastation if they lost federal funding.

“We heard from dozens and dozens of nonprofits across the state that receive some level of federal funding for the services that they’re providing Delawareans in areas of housing and youth support, as well as homelessness and health care,” McBride said. “So there would be significant consequences, even in its most limited form, for those organizations and for the Delawareans that work for them and rely on them, because in many cases, they’re operating on very slim budgets.”

Sheila Bravo, executive director of the Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Alliance, said the order caused a lot of confusion for nonprofits. She said many may lose the ability to operate if they lost federal funding.

“Many nonprofits have different streams of funding, but particularly in Health and Human Services and in education, they’re primarily funded through government programs, and a lot of that funding is sourced at the federal level,” Bravo said. “Often these grants or contracts are reimbursable, which means that the nonprofit has to spend the money first and then gets reimbursed for it, which means they’re already putting a lot of money out to do the work, and if they don’t get reimbursed, they may not necessarily have the cash to continue.”