In a court filing Wednesday, the Trump administration has said they will be unable to comply with a federal judge’s order to restart funding allocations to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
According to NBC News, despite being directed almost two weeks ago to unfreeze funding to the organization, lawyers from the Justice Department claimed that if the D.C. U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals doesn’t put a pause on the order, they will be unable to meet the deadline.
“[R]egardless whether this Court stays the district court’s order, agency leadership has determined that the ordered payments ‘cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the district court,” the filing said.
In another filing, NBC News reported the Justice Department said the process isn’t as simple as “turning on a switch,” and noted it could take weeks to comply.
“Additional time is required because restarting funding related to terminated or suspended agreements is not as simple as turning on a switch or faucet. Rather, the payment systems of USAID and State are complicated and require various steps before payments are authorized,” the government said.
The government estimated it would need to free up about $2 billion to be in compliance, with a projection of freeing up roughly $15 million by the end of the day.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali set a midnight deadline after aid groups and businesses argued that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development were not complying with his Feb. 13 order, which blocked a blanket freeze on foreign aid. He issued two additional compliance orders last week.
At a hearing on Tuesday, attorneys for the aid groups reported that their clients had reached a crisis point. They had been forced to lay off employees, and staffers faced legal and sometimes physical threats for non-payment from vendors and creditors in some of the countries where they operate.
The judge asked a Justice Department lawyer about the government’s steps to comply with his order. The lawyer responded that he was “not in a position to answer that question.”
The government requested a stay on his order while it appealed to a higher court. However, the judge rejected this request in an order earlier on Wednesday, questioning the government’s claim that they would need weeks to comply.
“If Defendants wanted to propose a different schedule for achieving compliance, that is something they could have proposed to this Court and that the Court could have considered alongside Plaintiffs’ showings. Any such schedule would have to take into account that Defendants have already had nearly two weeks to come into compliance, apparently without taking any meaningful steps to unfreeze funds,” Ali said.
