Some $2 billion in foreign aid that the Trump administration had frozen must be paid out to humanitarian groups, a federal judge ruled Monday, adding that the freezing of those funds may have violated the separation of powers between the executive branch and Congress.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali wrote in a lengthy order that the Trump administration’s bid to withhold payment of funds already approved by Congress for humanitarian efforts around the world invoked an “unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected.”
It “flouts” the Constitution and “usurps Congress’s exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place,” the judge wrote.
The order is relatively narrow, however: It only directs the Trump administration to begin paying on bills for work that humanitarian groups had completed through the middle of February. The judge said he could not order the administration to make payments for future work or to restore contracts that had been completely canceled.
In short, Ali said funds must be directed where Congress had already allocated money for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The way foreign aid is administered in the United States is a “joint enterprise between our two political branches,” the judge wrote. “That partnership is not built out of convenience, but out of constitutional necessity.”
The judge’s ruling stems from a lawsuit filed by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council. The groups said the Trump administration’s freeze in January on foreign aid for work that had already been done majorly disrupted key services like the delivery of vaccines and medicine for diseases including HIV, AIDS and malaria.
Nonprofit groups were forced to quickly shutter and lay off staff when their contracts were abruptly frozen. Hundreds of people working at agencies around the world, including in places like Africa and India, were suddenly unable to continue care, conduct clinical trials or provide lifesaving medication, court records show.
Sworn statements and declarations from the humanitarian groups — which Ali drew attention to in his ruling — pointed out that staff who were left stranded and unable to meet financial obligations were placed in situations of great “harassment, intimidation and potential physical harm.”
Although Ali tore into the administration’s ham-fisted approach to the separation of powers, the judge acknowledged that he could not invalidate the State Department’s decision to cancel contracts it had already flagged in a “line-by-line” assessment.
Before the ruling was issued Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on social media that 83% of USAID programs had been cut.
Rubio said 5,200 contracts that were canceled accounted for “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.” He offered a “thank you” to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency — a government cost-slashing outfit operating under the guidance of Elon Musk — and the “hardworking staff who worked very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform.”
Ali’s ruling appeared to anticipate a challenge from Trump administration lawyers and pointed out that when “courts have confronted executive overreach of the foreign policy power in the past, they have stood prepared to reaffirm Congress’ role.”
In fact, the judge wrote, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had found in another case that “for our first 225 years, no president prevailed when contradicting a statute in the field of foreign affairs” and that the only time a problem would arise is if the spending itself conflicted with some other “constitutional obligation vested in the president.”
Attorneys for the government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that the administration could no longer delay compliance with an order to release the funds. Should the government challenge Ali’s latest ruling and send the case back to the Supreme Court, it is expected that Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh will side with the administration. Last week, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh joined Alito’s dissent in the 5-4 ruling.
In his dissent, Alito bristled: “Does a single district court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”