A federal judge said Thursday that the Trump administration continues to withhold foreign aid, despite a court order that said programs worldwide must have at least a temporary restoration of funding.
According to the Associated Press, a nonprofit group who worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was declined a request to hold Trump administration officials in contempt of the order by Judge Amir H. Ali, the judge who issued it.
A district court judge in Washington, D.C., declared that administration officials exploited his February 13th order — which was intended to temporarily lift the freeze on foreign aid — to instead fabricate a new, post-hoc justification for the mass suspension of funding.
In defiance of the judge’s directive, Deputy Secretary of USAID Pete Marocco and other senior officials, all Trump appointees, continued the indiscriminate suspension of funds, according to Ali.
This ruling emerges from a lawsuit filed by nonprofit organizations contesting the Trump administration’s month-old cessation of foreign assistance through USAID and the State Department, which abruptly halted $60 billion in annual aid and development programs abroad.
USAID staffers and contractors have said that the Department of State and USAID are yet to restart funding despite the order and are now owed hundreds of millions of dollars in funding payments from the federal government.
This week, Marocco and other administration officials defended their nonpayment in written arguments to the judge, asserting that they could lawfully suspend or terminate payments under thousands of contracts without violating the judge’s order. A program-by-program review of all State Department and USAID foreign assistance programs to determine which ones align with its agenda was also announced.
Interviews and court affidavits from aid organizations, and both current and former USAID staffers, reveal that the funding freeze and extensive staff purges by the Trump administration have effectively halted U.S. foreign assistance worldwide, resulting in thousands of layoffs and driving government partners to the brink of financial collapse.
German politician and Member of the European Parliament, Christine Anderson, told her European Union colleagues on Tuesday that she supports President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the USAID, and other organizations run by unelected bureaucrats, and replacing all of it with the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE.
“President Trump is showing us the way, and unless we want to go down in history as complete idiots, we should follow his lead,” Anderson said. “Green Deal, development aid, WHO, take it all down and give us DOGE instead so we can fight these despicable totalitarian misanthropists.”
