Prospects for reviving U.S. foreign aid grow even darker
Judge says Trump can cancel future foreign aid contracts, but must pay past bills
Formerly U.S.-supported programs to combat AIDS can be dropped by the Trump administration, but nearly $2 billion in past foreign aid owed to its humanitarian partners around the world must be paid, a U.S. district judge has ruled.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali ruled that “at some point” the government would have to spend $58 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress, but gave no deadline for doing so.
The Trump administration has frozen all foreign aid, with a supposed exception for life-saving humanitarian assistance. Because USAID, the U.S. foreign aid agency, has been essentially demolished, hardly any funds even for life-saving programs have actually been approved for payment.
The foreign aid freeze has threatened the lives of starving residents of impoverished nations and 20 million women, children and LGBTQ people who were receiving HIV-fighting antiretroviral medications approved by Congress and funded through USAID.
Ali said the Trump administration probably violated the Constitution by blocking money allocated by Congress.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali gave the Trump administration until Friday to provide a status report on payment of thousands of invoices owed to relief groups for work performed before Feb. 13.
By Annie Gowen and Justin Jouvenal
A U.S. district judge has ruled that the Trump administration must quickly pay nearly $2 billion in foreign assistance owed to its humanitarian partners around the world, saying the administration probably violated the Constitution by blocking money allocated by Congress.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali gave the Trump administration until Friday to provide a status report on payment of thousands of invoices owed to relief groups for work performed before Feb. 13.
But Ali also found that the State Department’s review and termination of thousands of contracts with aid groups for work after that date could stand. He said the government would have to spend $58 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress at some point, but could legally cancel most of its U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department contracts for future assistance as part of a plan to radically reduce foreign aid.
Countries around the globe have relied on that funding for decades for food, medicine, vaccines and more. Aid groups warn the cuts will result in humanitarian disasters.
In his ruling late Monday, Ali, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, offered a forceful rebuke of President Donald Trump’s sweeping and controversial assertion that he has the power to determine whether funds allocated by Congress are spent.
“The Executive not only claims his constitutional authority to determine how to spend appropriated funds, but usurps Congress’s exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place,” Ali wrote. “In advancing this position, Defendants offer an unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected — a view that flouts multiple statutes whose constitutionality is not in question.”
It is the third time he has ordered payment for work completed by mid-February. The government had made some progress in paying for the work but had not substantially complied with a Monday deadline to release hundreds of millions in payments, according to an attorney working on the case who was not authorized to speak on the record.
Ali’s ruling made clear that he could not dictate how the Trump administration spends congressionally allocated funds going forward. In recent days, the State Department canceled about 9,900 of 13,100 USAID and State Department grants, according to Ali’s ruling.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday in a post on X that the agency had done a six-week analysis and was officially canceling “83% of the programs at USAID” — 5,200 contracts that “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.”
Two global health groups that sued the government had asked Ali to find that it was implausible that officials could meaningfully review so many contracts so quickly. They accused the Trump administration of using the review as a pretext to carry out a policy initiative — the canceling of foreign aid — that had been blocked by the courts. Ali found the plaintiffs hadn’t proved that contention but didn’t make a ruling on it.
“The Court finds Plaintiffs have not made an adequate showing that the large-scale terminations resulted from the same agency action they challenge in their complaints,” he wrote. …
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Without the funds they were expecting, aid groups’ work has ground to a halt in places such as Ethiopia and Sudan, with medicine and food stranded in warehouses. A USAID official was fired after he found that the cuts would create a humanitarian catastrophe, leading to large increases in malaria and a lack of treatment for pregnant women, among other issues.
Ali wrote in his Monday order that the freeze had caused “immense irreparable harm to businesses and organizations across the country, which has, at least to date, gone unrebutted by Defendants.”
