A federal appeals court will allow Donald Trump’s administration to continue withholding billions of dollars in foreign aid, dealing a major blow to aid groups and potentially teeing up a critical Supreme Court test to the president’s attempts to control funding approved by Congress.
The 2-1 decision from the three-judge panel — which includes judges appointed by Trump and George H.W. Bush — overturned a district court’s injunction that ordered the administration to fork over money for food, medicine and other aid that the president blocked on his first day in office.
Aid groups that sued the administration to unfreeze foreign assistance did not have standing to bring the case, and “the district court erred in granting that relief because the grantees lack a cause of action to press their claims,” judges wrote on Wednesday.
The court’s only Democrat-appointed judge on the panel accused the court of supporting the president’s “unlawful behavior.”
“At bottom, the court’s acquiescence in and facilitation of the Executive’s unlawful behavior derails the ‘carefully crafted system of checked and balanced power’ that serves as the ‘greatest security against tyranny — the accumulation of excessive authority in a single branch,’” wrote Judge Florence Y. Pan, who was appointed by Joe Biden.
The administration “immediately suspended and subsequently terminated thousands of foreign-aid grants, with catastrophic consequences for the grantees and the people that they serve,” Pan wrote.
Plaintiffs in the case will now ask for the full 15-member appeals court panel to review the case, which could then land at the Supreme Court.
“Today’s decision is a significant setback for the rule of law and risks further erosion of basic separation of powers principles,” Public Citizen Litigation Group attorney Lauren Bateman said in a statement. “In the meantime, countless people will suffer disease, starvation and death.”
A recent study in The Lancet estimated Trump’s cuts could contribute to the deaths of 14 million million people by 2030, including as many as 5 million children under the age of 5.
Hours after entering office, Trump issued an executive order imposing a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid distribution, then gutted the U.S. Agency for International Development and placed virtually all of its staff on administrative leave while folding what remains of the dismantled agency into Marco Rubio’s State Department.
The agency was one of the largest aid programs in the world, providing essential humanitarian relief in dozens of life-saving missions in more than 100 countries. Elon Musk, who assumed control of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency with a mandate to slash budgets across the federal government, said he wanted the agency to be fed into a “wood chipper.”
Two nonprofit groups that receive federal funding — AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and Journalism Development Network — sued the Trump administration over the funding freeze, and a Biden-appointed judge in Washington, D.C. ordered the government to pay out nearly $2 billion in outstanding aid to U.S. partners.
Trump then appealed to the Supreme Court, which froze the deadline from Judge Judge Amir Ali but left open the door for Ali to order the administration to resume funding. He then issued another injunction, and ordered the administration to pay out billions of dollars for roughly 10,000 aid contracts that were canceled.
But the appeals court panel on Wednesday decided that only the Government Accountability Office can sue over alleged violations of the Impoundment Control Act.
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