WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has kept withholding foreign aid despite a court order and must at least temporarily restore the funding to programmes worldwide, a federal judge has said.
Judge Amir H. Ali on Thursday declined a request by nonprofit groups doing business with the US Agency for International Development to find Trump administration officials in contempt of his order, however.
The Washington, D.C., district court judge said administration officials had used his February 13 order to temporarily lift the freeze on foreign aid to instead "come up with a new, post-hoc rationalisation for the en masse suspension" of funding.
Despite the judge's order to the contrary, USAID Deputy Secretary Pete Marocco, a Trump appointee, and other top officials had "continued their blanket suspension of funds", Ali said.
The ruling comes in a lawsuit by the nonprofit groups challenging the Trump administration's month-old cutoff of foreign assistance through USAID and the State Department, which shut down USD 60 billion in annual aid and development programmes overseas almost overnight.
Even after Ali's order, USAID staffers and contractors say the State Department and USAID still have not restored payments even on hundreds of millions of dollars already owed by the government.
Marocco and other administration officials defended the nonpayment in written arguments to the judge this week. They contended that they could lawfully stop or terminate payments under thousands of contracts without violating the judge's order.
The Trump administration says it is now doing a programme-by-programme review of all State Department and USAID foreign assistance programmes to see which ones meet the Trump administration's agenda.
Aid organisations, and current and former USAID staffers in interviews and court affidavits, say the funding freeze and deep Trump administration purges of USAID staffers have brought US foreign assistance globally to a halt, forced thousands of layoffs and is driving government partners to financial collapse.