Judge says Trump must pay past aid bills but can cancel future contracts

A U.S. district judge has ruled that the Trump administration must quickly pay nearly $2 billion in foreign assistance owed to its humanitarian partners around the world, saying the administration probably violated the Constitution by blocking money allocated by Congress.

U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali gave the Trump administration until Friday to provide a status report on payment of thousands of invoices owed to relief groups for work performed before Feb. 13.

But Ali also found that the State Department’s review and termination of thousands of contracts with aid groups for work after that date could stand. He said the government would have to spend $58 billion in foreign aid appropriated by Congress at some point, but could legally cancel most of its U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department contracts for future assistance as part of a plan to radically reduce foreign aid.

Countries around the globe have relied on that funding for decades for food, medicine, vaccines and more. Aid groups warn the cuts will result in humanitarian disasters.

In his ruling late Monday, Ali, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, offered a forceful rebuke of President Donald Trump’s sweeping and controversial assertion that he has the power to determine whether funds allocated by Congress are spent.

“The Executive not only claims his constitutional authority to determine how to spend appropriated funds, but usurps Congress’s exclusive authority to dictate whether the funds should be spent in the first place,” Ali wrote. “In advancing this position, Defendants 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.”

It is the third time he has ordered payment for work completed by mid-February. The government had made some progress in paying for the work but had not substantially complied with a March 10 deadline to release hundreds of millions in payments, according to an attorney working on the case who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Ali’s ruling made clear that he could not dictate how the Trump administration spends congressionally allocated funds going forward. In recent days, the State Department canceled about 9,900 of 13,100 USAID and State Department grants, according to Ali’s ruling.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday in a post on X that the agency had done a six-week analysis and was officially canceling “83% of the programs at USAID” - 5,200 contracts that “spent 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.”

Two global health groups that sued the government had asked Ali to find that it was implausible that officials could meaningfully review so many contracts so quickly. They accused the Trump administration of using the review as a pretext to carry out a policy initiative - the canceling of foreign aid - that had been blocked by the courts. Ali found the plaintiffs hadn’t proved that contention but didn’t make a ruling on it.

“The Court finds Plaintiffs have not made an adequate showing that the large-scale terminations resulted from the same agency action they challenge in their complaints,” he wrote.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday, but the global health groups - the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council - called the ruling a partial victory.

“Today’s decision affirms a basic principle of our Constitution: the president is not a king,” Lauren Bateman, an attorney with Public Citizen who is representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “But we are painfully aware that, without unwinding the mass termination of foreign assistance awards, winning on the constitutional issues does not avert the humanitarian disaster caused by the Trump Administration’s freeze on foreign assistance.”

The health groups and other partners had sued the Trump administration after the president issued his pause on foreign aid shortly after his inauguration, touching off a heated legal battle.

Ali quickly issued a temporary restraining order requiring all the funding to be restarted. The aid groups accused the administration of flouting that order, and Ali eventually set a Feb. 26 deadline to restart some of the payments.

The administration asked the Supreme Court to block the deadline. In a sharply divided decision last week, a majority found that Ali could enforce his order.

As is customary in emergency orders, the majority did not detail its reasoning. But the dissent from four of the court’s conservatives was furious.

“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,” wrote Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.

Lawyers for the government told Ali on Thursday that health organizations had been paid $70 million overnight. But the USAID payment system has been largely offline for weeks, according to the groups’ lawsuit, after associates of Trump adviser Elon Musk allegedly ordered widespread staff cuts.

Without the funds they were expecting, aid groups’ work has ground to a halt in places such as Ethiopia and Sudan, with medicine and food stranded in warehouses. A USAID official was fired after he found that the cuts would create a humanitarian catastrophe, leading to large increases in malaria and a lack of treatment for pregnant women, among other issues.

Ali wrote in his Monday order that the freeze had caused “immense irreparable harm to businesses and organizations across the country, which has, at least to date, gone unrebutted by Defendants.”

Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is tasked with confirming the president’s nominees to fill the top positions in the State Department, are pushing to stall the process to fill key roles unless Rubio agrees to testify about the administration’s cancellation of U.S. foreign assistance programs.

“We should not confirm any additional nominees for State Department positions until Secretary Rubio appears before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and fully explains the dismantling of USAID, the firing of dedicated public servants, and the unilateral cancellation of contracts without the consultation with Congress,” Democratic Sens. Chris Murphy (Connecticut), Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) and Jeff Merkley (Oregon) wrote Monday in a letter to the committee’s leadership.

The committee’s chairman, Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), appeared to agree to delay Tuesday’s planned committee meeting, after the Democrats requested a “holdover” on “business as usual” until Rubio testifies.

Jenny Breen, an associate professor of law at Syracuse University, said Ali’s ruling was notable for its pushback on Trump’s assertion of broad power over funding decisions.

“The opinion forcefully rejects the government’s assertions of unconstrained executive power by reminding it of Congress’s constitutionally mandated lead role in spending and partnership role in foreign affairs,” Breen said.