Trump overstepped his constitutional authority in freezing Congress'
funding for USAID, judge says
[March 12, 2025]
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump overstepped his constitutional
authority in freezing almost all spending on U.S. humanitarian and
development work abroad, a federal judge ruled, saying the
administration could no longer simply sit on the tens of billions of
dollars that Congress has appropriated for foreign aid.
But Judge Amir H. Ali stopped short of ordering Trump officials to use
the money to revive the thousands of contracts they have abruptly
terminated for U.S. aid and development work around the world.
Ali's ruling Monday evening came hours after Secretary of State Marco
Rubio announced that the administration had finished what has been a
six-week purge of programs of the six-decade-old U.S. Agency for
International Development, cutting 83% of them. Rubio said he would move
the remaining aid programs under the State Department.
Rubio made his announcement in a post on X, in one of his few public
comments on what has been a historic shift away from U.S. foreign aid
and development, executed by Trump political appointees at the State
Department and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency teams.
Rubio in the post thanked DOGE and “our hardworking staff who worked
very long hours to achieve this overdue and historic reform” in foreign
aid.
Trump on Jan. 20 issued an executive order directing a freeze of foreign
assistance funding and a review of all U.S. aid and development work
abroad. Trump charged that much of foreign assistance was wasteful and
advanced a liberal agenda.
Rubio's social media post Monday said that review was now “officially
ending," with some 5,200 of USAID's 6,200 programs eliminated. Those
programs “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,” Rubio wrote. About 1,000 remaining contracts would now
be administered by the State Department, he said.
Democratic lawmakers and others call the shutdown of congressionally
funded programs illegal, saying such a move requires Congress' approval.
In his preliminary injunction Monday, Ali said Trump could not simply
ignore most of what is roughly $60 billion in foreign assistance funding
that was given to USAID and State by Congress, which under the U.S.
Constitution has the authority to spend money.
“The constitutional power over whether to spend foreign aid is not the
President’s own — and it is Congress’s own,” Ali wrote, adding elsewhere
that Trump officials “offer an unbridled view of Executive power that
the Supreme Court has consistently rejected.”
But Ali declined the request from nonprofit groups and businesses to
revive the canceled contracts for foreign assistance work around the
world, saying it was up to the administration to make decisions on
specific contracts. The mass contract cancellations also were a separate
matter than the funding freeze that two global health groups, the AIDS
Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council, had originally
gone to court to challenge, he said.
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Lane Pollack, center, of Rockville, Md., a senior learning advisor
at USAID for 14 years, is consoled by a co-worker after having 15
minutes to clear out her belongings from the USAID headquarters,
Friday, Feb. 28, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Ali also ordered Trump officials to pay all of the roughly $2
billion it owed to aid groups and businesses up to mid-February, and
ordered them to do it at a pace of at least 300 back payments a day.
Despite claims from the administration it was continuing to fund at
least life-saving programs in its foreign aid freeze, USAID staffers
and the agency's nonprofit and business partners say all payments
through USAID were cut off until recently, and that USAID's payment
system itself disabled by Musk's DOGE.
Ali's ruling came after the Supreme Court had rejected the Trump
administration's appeal in the case.
USAID supporters said the sweep of the cuts have made it difficult
to tell what U.S. efforts abroad the Trump administration actually
supports.
“The patterns that are emerging is the administration does not
support democracy programs, they don’t support civil society ...
they don’t support NGO programs,” or health or emergency response,
said Andrew Natsios, the USAID administrator for Republican former
President George W. Bush.
“So what’s left”?” Natsios asked.
Republicans broadly have made clear they want foreign assistance
that would promote a far narrower interpretation of U.S. national
interests going forward.
The dismantling of USAID that followed Trump’s order upended decades
of policy that humanitarian and development aid abroad advanced U.S.
national security by stabilizing regions and economies,
strengthening alliances and building goodwill.
The State Department said in a court filing earlier this month it
was killing more than 90% of USAID programs. Rubio gave no
explanation for why his number was lower.
In the weeks after Trump's order, one of his appointees and
transition team members, Pete Marocco, and Musk pulled USAID staff
around the world off the job through forced leaves and firings, shut
down USAID payments overnight and terminated aid and development
contracts by the thousands.
The shutdown has left many USAID staffers and contractors and their
families still overseas, many of them awaiting back payments and
travel expenses to return home.
The Trump administration on Monday gave USAID staffers abroad until
April 6 to move back to the United States if they want to do so on
the government’s tab, according to a USAID email sent to staffers
and seen by The Associated Press. Staffers say the deadline gives
them scant time to pull children from school, sell homes or break
leases, and, for many, find somewhere to live after years away from
the United States.
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Associate Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed.
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