Judge Orders Trump to Release Some Of $2B in Frozen Foreign Aid

A federal judge gave the Trump administration until Monday to pay several nonprofit groups and aid organizations affected by President Donald Trump’s broad freeze on foreign aid spending and his attempts to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), AP reports.

District Court Judge Amir Ali, who was appointed by President Joe Biden, issued the new deadline at the end of a four-hour hearing that came a day after the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s emergency appeal asking it to stay one of Ali’s previous orders in the case. 

The new deadline comes in a lawsuit filed by a global health group, an AIDS/HIV relief organization and a nonprofit journalism network challenging Trump’s day-one executive order to halt all foreign assistance for 90 days.

The total amount of aid kept from USAID contractors and grant recipients is around $2 billion, but Ali in his order limited payouts to only those organizations involved in the lawsuit. In the judge’s previous directives, he required the Trump administration to unfreeze all funding.

It’s unclear exactly how much money the administration will have to dispense by Monday. In a filing Friday, the plaintiffs said the government has yet to fulfill around 1,200 outstanding invoices totalling approximately $420 million for work already completed. The Trump administration said in a filing Thursday that it released around $70 million to the plaintiffs earlier this week.