Trump’s Suspension of USAID Funding Likely Violated Constitution, Judge Rules

A federal judge ruled Monday that President Donald Trump’s extensive freeze to foreign aid spending through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) usurped Congress’s constitutional authority to decide how money can be spent by the government.

District Court Judge Amir Ali, appointed by President Joe Biden, barred the Trump administration from impounding congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds and to pay USAID bills for existing contracts and grants through Feb. 13.

Ali criticized the defendants “unbridled view” of executive power, saying it “flouts multiple statutes whose constitutionality is not in question” and the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

“Asserting this ‘vast and generally unreviewable’ executive power and diminution of Congressional power, Defendants do not cite any provision of Article I or Article II of the Constitution,” the judge wrote.

The ruling is the latest step in lawsuits brought by a global health group, an AIDS/HIV relief organization and a nonprofit journalism network challenging Trump’s day-one executive order to halt all foreign assistance for 90 days.

Last week, Ali gave the Trump administration until the end of Monday to pay the groups involved in the lawsuit. However, Monday’s ruling also required the administration to submit a report on how it plans to pay all organizations who had completed contracted work before Feb. 13.

Ali said the plaintiffs provided an “unrebutted showing of enormous harm” from the funding halt. However, he denied their request for the court to reverse the thousands of foreign assistance contracts that have been cancelled by the Trump administration since late Jan. 20.

While Ali found that the administration unlawfully impounded congressionally appropriated foreign aid funds, he said the contract cancellations were a separate issue from the funding freeze being challenged by the plaintiffs. 

The judge could bar the Trump administration from unlawfully impounding funds, but he said he did not want to “entangle” the court into reviewing individual contracts that were terminated or suspended.

“This would devolve into the type of intensive supervision of day-to-day agency activities, as well as inquiry into the terms of individual awards, that the Court has expressly rejected,” he wrote.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has taken control of USAID even though it is a separate agency from the State Department, said in a post Monday that 83% of USAID contracts would be cut. 

The Supreme Court last week rejected an emergency appeal from the Trump administration asking it to stay one of Ali’s previous orders in the case.