Judge won’t order US to restore canceled foreign aid contracts
- USAID payments of close to $2 billion for work already completed must be expedited — but beyond this, a federal judge declined to order the Trump administration to restore the agency’s contracts and grants.
- The judge said that, while he cannot order the administration to spend the money on specific contracts, it must ultimately be spent, unless Congress says otherwise.
- “From funneling tax dollars to risky research in Wuhan to sending Ukrainians to Paris Fashion Week, USAID is one of the worst offenders of waste in Washington … all around the world,” Republican Sen. Joni Ernst said in a post on X, as reported by Fox.
A federal judge on Monday declined to order President Donald Trump’s administration to restore thousands of foreign aid contracts and grants that have been canceled since the president took office, though he found that the administration must speed up payments of close to $2 billion for already completed work.
At the same time, US district judge Amir Ali in Washington ruled against the administration on a major legal issue, finding that the president cannot refuse to spend money appropriated for foreign aid by the US Congress.
The Trump administration, along with billionaire Elon Musk as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been touting the discovery of “billions of dollars” worth of waste and fraud funneled through foreign aid.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, the Senate DOGE Caucus chair, cited one “wasteful and dangerous” spending by the US Agency for International Development or USAID.
Fox News reported that Ernst highlighted that the agency “authorized a whopping $20 million to create a ‘Sesame Street’ in Iraq.”
‘Waste’
“From funneling tax dollars to risky research in Wuhan to sending Ukrainians to Paris Fashion Week, USAID is one of the worst offenders of waste in Washington … all around the world,” Ernst said in a post on X, as reported by Fox.
The judge said that, while he cannot order the administration to spend the money on specific contracts, it must ultimately be spent, unless Congress says otherwise.
“The provision and administration of foreign aid has been a joint enterprise between our two political branches,” Ali wrote. “That partnership is built not out of convenience, but of constitutional necessity.”
The order comes in response to lawsuits by organizations that contract with, or receive grants from USAID and the State Department, which sued to challenge the administration’s blanket freeze of nearly all foreign aid payments in response to a January 20 executive order by Trump.
‘Not a king’
“Today’s decision affirms a basic principle of our Constitution: the president is not a king,” said Lauren Bateman, a lawyer for two of the plaintiffs. “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.”
Ali on Feb. 13 ruled that the blanket freeze was illegal and ordered it lifted, but the administration nonetheless kept nearly all payments frozen.
It said it was conducting an individualized review of all of its contracts and grants, and resisted repeated court orders to release the money, including through an unsuccessful appeal to the US Supreme Court.
On Feb. 26, the government said it had completed its review and made final decisions to terminate more than 90 percent of its awards.
Plaintiffs in the case have said that no real review was done, pointing to communications within the agencies ordering mass terminations of hundreds of contracts at a time.
Ali last week set a deadline of Monday at 6 p.m. (11 p.m. GMT) to pay invoices for work done before Feb. 13 to the organizations that are part of the lawsuit, amounting to about $671 million.
