Judge orders USAID payments to some foreign aid groups by Monday
People protest President Donald Trump's decision to shut down USAID on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. (Photo by Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
A U.S. district court judge ruled Thursday that the Trump administration must pay tens of millions of dollars in outstanding foreign aid by the end of Monday, but the fate of hundreds of millions more in spending for lifesaving food and medicine has yet to be resolved.
Judge Amir H. Ali ruled that the government must pay the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, the Global Health Council and other plaintiffs the outstanding balances they are owed, calling it a “concrete step” forward in an ongoing lawsuit over the Trump administration’s abrupt pause in foreign aid. The American Bar Association is one of the plaintiffs in the suit.
The suspension and cancellation of thousands of humanitarian contracts has led to life-threatening disruptions in food assistance and medicine around the world, aid groups have said.
Lawyers for the government told Ali on Thursday that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development had paid the health organizations $70 million overnight, after a narrowly divided Supreme Court turned aside a Trump administration request to keep the payments halted.
The judge set a noon Friday deadline for the government and the health organizations to clarify how much more the groups are owed.
Because Ali ruled only on the money owed to the groups that filed the lawsuit, the fate of nearly $2 billion in payments to other aid organizations remained up in the air.
Ali said he felt comfortable ordering a Monday deadline for the first round of payments, calling it “feasible” and saying it represented a small fraction of the overall amount that United States owes its foreign aid partners.
The judge had ordered all the money unfrozen last month, but the Trump administration is pushing back against that directive.
During the more than four-hour hearing Thursday, Ali at times appeared skeptical at the government’s argument that presidents have authority to overrule Congress on spending that relates to foreign policy.
“Is the Appropriations Clause [of the Constitution] optional?” he asked attorney Indraneel Sur.
The plaintiffs have accused the administration of defying Ali’s order to restart the payments, while Trump officials say they had separate legal authority to halt most of the spending for food, medicine, vaccines and more.
“Despite the ongoing harm to our clients and the suffering caused to people in need around the world, the government has done almost nothing to comply,” Allison Zieve, director of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, which is representing the groups, said in a statement before the hearing.
Ali initially ordered the Trump administration to restart the foreign aid in a Feb. 13 ruling. He then set a Feb. 26 deadline for nearly $2 billion to begin flowing again for work completed before Feb. 13, after signaling he felt the government was not complying with his original order.
The administration asked the Supreme Court to block that deadline, but the justices rejected the request in a 5-4 ruling on Wednesday. It was the high court’s first significant action on Trump’s agenda in his second term.
In response to the Supreme Court action, Ali told the groups and the Trump administration to submit a plan Thursday morning with a schedule to begin repayment.
The global health groups wrote in the joint filing that they wanted the Trump administration to restart hundreds of millions of dollars in payments by March 10.
The Justice Department wrote that the administration had canceled the vast majority of State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development contracts that the global health groups wanted restarted—and that the government had the legal authority to do so.
Jenny Breen, an associate professor of law at Syracuse University, reviewed the filing at the request of The Washington Post and questioned the government’s response. “It does not sound like they are in meaningful compliance,” she said.
The global health groups had sued the administration over its 90-day pause on foreign assistance, claiming the order was causing widespread suffering and death in unstable regions around the world.
Trump officials said they wanted to review thousands of contracts to ensure they were in keeping with the president’s policy initiatives.
At the hearing Thursday, Sur said the Trump administration had completed its review and canceled most of the contracts as a result. The lawyer said the administration did so under a separate authority than the executive order Trump used to pause the aid.
The cancellations meant the reason for Ali’s temporary restraining order was now moot, Sur told the judge—there was no longer aid to restore.
“The funding freeze is not continuing,” he said. “It’s over.”
Lauren Bateman, an attorney for some of the plaintiffs in the case, questioned how the government could have reviewed thousands of contracts on an individual basis in a short period. She said the review was a way to do an end-run around Ali’s temporary restraining order and continue a policy the administration wanted to carry out.
Bateman also said her clients had received communications that the review might be continuing.
“All evidence suggests these terminations were not made in good faith,” Bateman said.
See also:
Write a letter to the editor, share a story tip or update, or report an error.
Topics: Career & Practice
Federal judge's warning about potential violence after Trump's comments was not ethics violation, 3rd Circuit says
Your Voice
When policies afford legal professionals discretion, they should choose to be trauma informed
Podcasts
