A judge on Thursday examined arguments over President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze billions of dollars in foreign aid after the Supreme Court ruled this week that the lower court had authority to force the administration to make some payments.
Judge Amir Ali decided at the end of the hourslong hearing that the U.S. Agency for International Development must pay nearly $2 billion by Monday evening in outstanding invoices to various nonprofit organizations that sued the Trump administration.
Ali, a Biden appointee, said he felt that was a “feasible” interim resolution after hearing tedious presentations from the nonprofit groups and the Department of Justice about the Administrative Procedures Act and constitutional questions, including how the judge’s order might properly account for the separation of powers.
Ali’s order only applies to payments owed for work completed prior to mid-February. The judge said he planned to hear more arguments in the coming days and weeks from the DOJ about other reasonable benchmarks he could set for the Trump administration to meet.
The nonprofit groups are seeking a sweeping injunction against the government that would restore USAID, which Trump has moved to dismantle and fold into the State Department.
“The relief would be depriving executive branch agencies of their spending latitude. That would be a harm that the court would have to weigh,” a government attorney argued Thursday.
Ali imposed a restraining order on the Trump administration two weeks ago, but government officials struggled to abide by it, leading the administration to turn to the Supreme Court to avoid having to follow Ali’s order.
The Supreme Court rejected Trump in a 5-4 vote, but Chief Justice John Roberts suggested that the immediacy with which Ali expected the USAID to pay its bills was unrealistic and that the judge would need to come up with a specific and reasonable timeline.
Ali was deferential to the high court throughout Thursday’s hearing, repeatedly emphasizing that he needed to work urgently with the parties in the case to come up with “concrete steps” to reach a resolution, per Roberts’s instruction. The DOJ attorneys emphasized that USAID no longer has the staff to fulfill contract obligations in any case because of the sheer volume of employees who have been laid off. They said the government is working to rehire the people it needs to access USAID’s payment systems to meet the judge’s requirements.
The plaintiffs include the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, which conducts HIV treatment programs across the globe and had a five-year agreement with the government that ran through mid-2026.
Others include the Global Health Council and HIAS, a Jewish refugee group. The plaintiffs are arguing that not only should their contracts be honored because they were funded through Congress but that Trump’s executive order pausing all foreign aid must be reversed entirely. They said that the Trump administration’s efforts to freeze or cancel the vast majority of its foreign assistance funding have had dire consequences.
“The enormity of Defendants’ actions cannot be overstated,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote in a court filing, saying “millions” of people across the world have been affected negatively.
“Staff who operate humanitarian operations at refugee camps in Syria were told to stop work, leaving thousands of people vulnerable to instability and violence at the hands of ISIS. Colombian anti-narcotrafficking helicopters were grounded for lack of fuel. Soup kitchens that feed nearly a million people in famine-stricken Khartoum have shut down. Clinical trials that had been underway in Uganda for a potentially lifesaving children’s tuberculosis treatment stopped. In the Ivory Coast, a program to collect intelligence on Al Qaeda shut down. Toddlers in Zambia have been deprived of rehydration salts to treat life-threatening diarrhea,” the plaintiffs wrote.
SUPREME COURT REJECTS TRUMP ON USAID FOREIGN AID FREEZE
The Trump administration has sought to shut down USAID as part of its efforts to slim down the federal government. The president has said the State Department still plans to pay for critical lifesaving services abroad while canceling 90% of the agency’s contracts.
Trump has said USAID has grossly mismanaged its funds in recent years and also allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to left-wing pet projects in other countries. A State Department official recently told Congress that the department was considering making criminal referrals to the DOJ for alleged fraudulent spending by USAID.
