Judge Declines Bid to Force Federal Government to Restore Canceled Foreign Aid Contracts

The judge also ordered officials to pay for work that was previously completed.

The U.S. Agency for International Development logo is covered with black tape in Washington on Feb. 7, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

A federal judge on March 10 declined to compel President Donald Trump’s administration to restore foreign assistance contracts that it had canceled.

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said that Trump’s administration must spend money allocated by Congress on foreign aid, but that it is up to the Executive Branch as to which projects it funds with the money.

“The separation of powers dictates only that the Executive follow Congress’s decision to spend funds, and both the Constitution and Congress’s laws have traditionally afforded the Executive discretion on how to spend within the constraints set by Congress,” Ali said in a 48-page ruling.

“The appropriate remedy is accordingly to order Defendants to ’make available for obligation the full amount of funds Congress appropriated' under the relevant laws.”

Officials have canceled about 9,900 of the 13,100 USAID and State Department agreements, according to court filings. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media this week that the canceled contracts “did not serve, (and in some cases even harmed), the core national interests of the United States.”

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit from organizations that had agreements with the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) when Trump paused foreign aid spending to let the State Department review agreements to make sure they furthered his agenda.

After Ali previously ruled that USAID and the State Department must fund contracts that predated the Trump administration but were paused under the freeze, the U.S. Supreme Court directed the judge to clarify which obligations the government must meet to comply with his order.

Ali set a March 10 deadline to issue payments to the organizations, while promising further instructions concerning groups that are not parties in the case.

In the new ruling, Ali said that the Executive Branch unlawfully impounded congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds and ordered the Trump administration to pay committed funds for work completed before Feb. 13.

The administration must pay nearly $2 billion in total, issuing around 300 payments a day until the organizations that had agreements with the government are recompensed for their work, the judge said.

Ali said that he concluded that government lawyers defending the withholding of foreign assistance funds, which were allocated by Congress, “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.”

However, he also said that courts are restrained in the relief they can offer in such disputes.

“The Court must be careful that any relief it grants does not itself intrude on the prerogative of a coordinate branch,” he said. “The Court accordingly denies Plaintiffs’ proposed relief that would unnecessarily entangle the Court in supervision of discrete or ongoing Executive decisions, as well as relief that goes beyond what their claims allow.”