By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration expects to finish paying about $671 million owed for completed work to foreign aid organizations suing it over its sweeping shutdown of most U.S. foreign aid work by Friday, nearly two weeks after a court-ordered deadline, according to a court filing.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali in Washington had ordered the administration to complete the payments by Monday, March 10 to the organizations that sued, and to process at least 300 payments per day to organizations that are not part of the litigation. The total owed to organizations in and outside of the litigation for their completed work is close to $2 billion.
Lauren Bateman of Public Citizen, a lawyer for two plaintiffs, said her clients – the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and Journalism Development Network, nonprofits that receive grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and State Department – had not yet been fully paid.
“The government appears to be treating the court’s orders as mere suggestions,” she said.
A lawyer representing groups that contract with USAID and State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case is one of several over the Trump administration’s freeze in January of most foreign aid funds, and has been marked by accusations from plaintiffs that the administration is defying Ali’s orders. The Justice Department has said that the administration has tried in good faith to comply with all of Ali’s orders.
On February 13, Ali ordered the administration to stop enforcing Trump’s freeze, but the administration kept nearly all of the funds frozen anyway, arguing that its contracts and grant agreements gave it the authority to do so despite the order. The judge repeatedly ordered the administration to comply, and eventually set a February 26 deadline for making all $2 billion in payments for work done before February 13.
The administration immediately appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which on March 5 declined to block Ali’s order but told him to consider “feasibility” in setting deadlines. Ali set the new March 10 deadline the next day.
Justice Department lawyers have said in court filings that USAID, which has fired or put on leave much of its personnel and shuttered its headquarters, and the State Department were simply unable to process the payments as quickly as Ali ordered because of a new review process. Plaintiffs have called that process a deliberately self-inflicted obstacle, pointing out that the agencies had previously processed thousands of payments per day.
The plaintiffs sued the administration in early February to lift the blanket freeze on foreign aid payments ordered by the Republican president on his first day in office, and to undo the dismantling of USAID under the oversight of Trump’s billionaire ally Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency that he spearheads.
A judge in a separate case ruled on Tuesday that Musk and DOGE likely violated the U.S. Constitution in “multiple ways” by moving to shut down USAID, and blocked them from taking any further steps against the agency.
Earlier this month, the administration announced that the original foreign aid freeze was lifted, and that it had made final decisions to terminate most of its foreign aid contracts following a review.
The plaintiffs are continuing to challenge those terminations, which they argue were not based on a genuine review, citing internal communications from administration officials ordering staffers to terminate hundreds of contracts at a time and to find legal rationales for doing so.
Ali in a preliminary ruling last week declined to order the agreements restored, though he found that the U.S. Constitution requires the administration ultimately to spend all of the money appropriated by Congress for foreign aid.
(Reporting by Brendan Pierson in New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Richard Chang)
