A federal district court judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to release U.S. foreign aid and accused the administration of noncompliance with his previous order to end the funding freeze.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali on Tuesday ruled in a lawsuit filed by nonprofit organizations over the cutoff of foreign assistance through the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), an agency that the Trump administration has targeted in its federal spending reduction efforts in recent weeks.
Last week, Ali said that the Trump administration failed to follow his previous order and must at least temporarily restore the funding to programs worldwide. However, he refused to order that the administration should be found in contempt of court.
At that time, the judge said administration officials had used his initial Feb. 13 order to temporarily lift the freeze on foreign aid to instead “come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension” of funding.
Nonprofit groups who receive federal grant money for work abroad said the freeze breaks federal law and has shut down funding for aid programs abroad. USAID and State partners say the administration has stiffed them on billions of dollars in money already owed.
“The reality on the ground is even more dire than those directives would suggest. With extremely limited exceptions, USAID and the State Department have halted the flow of funding even to existing partners, even for work performed before President Trump took office, plunging those organizations (and the people who depend on them) into turmoil and costing thousands of Americans their jobs,” they wrote.
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” the order reads. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
After Trump took over, his administration has set its crosshairs on USAID. Earlier this month, the president wrote on social media that spending at USAID is “totally unexplainable” and called for officials to “close it down.”
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, previously described the aid agency as a “criminal organization” and that Trump agreed to “shut it down.”
Earlier this month, a separate federal judge argued that the Trump administration has not complied with a previous order. U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island found that the administration had not fully unfrozen federal grants and loans within the United States, after he blocked sweeping plans to pause trillions of dollars in government spending.
