Funding freeze on US foreign aid is 'over,' Trump administration claims

The funding freeze on U.S. foreign assistance is over, according to the Trump administration — and the “individualized review” of all awards is now complete. That’s according to a court filing submitted on Monday, which urged the Supreme Court to excuse the government from immediately repaying some $2 billion in foreign aid. “[USAID’s implementing partners] assert that they ‘would face extraordinary and irreversible harm if the funding freeze continues,’” wrote Sarah Harris, the acting solicitor general representing the Trump administration. “But the ‘funding freeze’ is not continuing; it is over.” The U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State have “developed and began implementing procedures” to process payment requests for already-completed work, Harris added, though she noted “the government cannot just press a button and disburse funds in response to any request that fits the district court’s description.” Harris’s argument comes after a month of legal back-and-forth and a week that culminated in the Trump administration slashing more than 90% of USAID’s awards overnight. On Feb. 13, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali first mandated the Trump administration to lift its blanket freeze on foreign assistance through a temporary restraining order. Two weeks later, Ali said he’d seen no evidence the government had complied with that directive — and required it to do so by midnight the following day. The administration immediately sought reprieve, first from the U.S. Court of Appeals, which denied the request, and then from the Supreme Court, which allowed for a temporary pause on Ali’s latest order. In the time between, the Trump administration culled nearly all USAID-funded programs, including those it had previously exempted for delivering lifesaving humanitarian assistance. Far from “refusing to comply” with Ali’s order, Harris states the Trump administration had done just that: ultimately deciding to retain over 500 USAID awards worth up to $57 billion last week. But in 2023, USAID and the State Department spent a combined $61 billion on 11,000 programs — making Harris’s numbers virtually impossible. While Devex has attempted to seek clarity on those calculations, the State Department has not responded to repeated requests for comment. “The Department of State and USAID have now largely completed their individualized review of all funding awards and decided to retain thousands of awards, rendering respondents’ original challenge to the blanket ‘freeze’ moot,” Harris wrote on Monday. Harris also argued that the organizations suing the Trump administration were attempting to disable the president’s “lawful means of making decisions about foreign aid,” reiterating that such an authority lies with the executive office, not the judiciary. Foreign affairs, Harris states, is the place where a president’s “power is at its height,” and because of that, Ali’s “extraordinary resulting order cries out” for a Supreme Court intervention. Organizations across the world are still waiting for the Supreme Court’s response, which will decide whether the Trump administration needs to pay its partners for work completed before Feb. 13, the day Ali first issued the temporary restraining order on the foreign aid funding freeze. The decision could come down at any moment, and once it does, it will set the tone for the remainder of the lower court’s trial.