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.”
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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.
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.
Associate Press writer Lindsay Whitehurst contributed.
