By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) - 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, U.S. 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 U.S. Congress. He 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, the U.S. Agency for International Development 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.
"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 February 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 U.S. Supreme Court.
On February 26, the government said it had completed its review and made final decisions to terminate more than 90% 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 6:00 p.m. (11:00 p.m. GMT) to pay invoices for work done before February 13 to the organizations that are part of the lawsuit, amounting to about $671 million. It was not immediately clear whether that deadline had been met.
In Monday’s order, Ali further ordered the administration to process past invoices from organizations that are not part of the lawsuit at a rate of about 300 per day. The administration has said that the total amount owed to all foreign aid partners for work before February 13 is close to $2 billion.
The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Trump administration’s foreign aid freeze has thrown humanitarian relief efforts around the world into chaos, which has persisted even as some payments have begun flowing again.