The Trump administration has kept withholding foreign aid despite a court order and must at least temporarily restore the funding to programmes worldwide, a federal judge said on Thursday.
Judge Amir H Ali declined a request by nonprofit groups doing business with the US Agency for International Development to find Trump administration officials in contempt of his order.
The Washington DC district court judge said administration officials had used his February 13 order to temporarily lift the freeze on foreign aid to instead “come up with a new, post-hoc rationalisation for the en masse suspension” of funding.
Despite the judge’s order to the contrary, USAID deputy secretary Pete Marocco, a Trump appointee, and other top officials had “continued their blanket suspension of funds,” Judge Ali said.
The ruling comes in a lawsuit by the nonprofit groups challenging the Trump administration’s month-old cutoff of foreign assistance through USAID and the State Department, which shut down 60 billion dollars (£47.3 billion) in annual aid and development programs overseas almost overnight.
Even after Judge Ali’s order, USAID staff and contractors say the State Department and USAID have not restored payments on the government’s hundreds of millions of dollars already owed.
Mr Marocco and other administration officials defended the non-payment in written arguments to the judge this week.
They contended that they could lawfully stop or terminate payments under thousands of contracts without violating the judge’s order.
The Trump administration says it is now doing a program-by-program review of all State Department and USAID foreign assistance programs to see which ones meet the Trump administration’s agenda.
Aid organisations and current and former USAID staffers, in interviews and court affidavits, say the funding freeze and deep Trump administration purges of USAID staffers have brought US foreign assistance globally to a halt, forced thousands of layoffs and are driving government partners to financial collapse.
