A federal judge ordered government officials to comply with his previous order to restore foreign aid.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali said the temporary restraining order “does not permit Defendants to simply continue their blanket suspension of congressionally appropriated foreign aid pending a review of the agreements for whether they should be continued or terminated.”
“That is the very action that the Court temporarily enjoined because Plaintiffs had shown that blanket suspension pending review would cause irreparable harm and was likely arbitrary and capricious under the APA [Administrative Procedure Act] for failing to consider the massive reliance interests,” Ali wrote.
According to Ali, the Trump administration used the previous February 13 order to temporarily lift the foreign aid freeze and “come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension.”
Trump administration officials argued in a subsequent court filing that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) had “not yet identified a termination, suspension, or stopwork order issued on a USAID contract, grant, or cooperative agreement that was not allowed” under the February 13 order.
Ali’s ruling is connected to a lawsuit filed by nonprofit groups.
In signing the January 20 executive order freezing foreign aid, President Donald Trump said the nation’s “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values. 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.”
The order noted that “[n]ew obligations and disbursements of foreign development assistance funds may resume for a program prior to the end of the 90-day period if a review is conducted, and the Secretary of State or his designee, in consultation with the Director of OMB, decide to continue the program in the same or modified form.”
