WASHINGTON: The Trump administration has kept withholding foreign aid despite a court order and must at least temporarily restore the funding to programs worldwide, a federal judge said Thursday.
Judge Amir H. Ali 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 Feb. 13 order to temporarily lift the freeze on foreign aid to instead “come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization 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 $60 billion in annual aid and development programs 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 program-by-program review of all State Department and USAID foreign assistance programs to see which ones meet the Trump administration’s agenda.
Aid organizations, 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.
Trump administration is flouting an order to temporarily lift a freeze on foreign aid, judge says
https://arab.news/56bu7
Trump administration is flouting an order to temporarily lift a freeze on foreign aid, judge says
- Judge Amir H. Ali noted that Trump's appointees to the State Department and USAID had “continued their blanket suspension of funds”
- The judge earlier issued a freeze order based on a lawsuit by the nonprofit groups challenging Trump's cutoff of US foreign assistance
EU to suspend 93 billion euro retaliatory trade package against US for 6 months
- “With the removal of the tariff threat by the US we can now return to the important business,” Gill said
- The Commission will soon make a proposal “to roll over our suspended countermeasures”
BRUSSELS: The European Commission said on Friday it would propose suspending for another six months an EU package of retaliatory trade measures against the US worth 93 billion euros ($109.19 billion) that would otherwise kick in on February 7.
The package, prepared in the first half of last year when the European Union was negotiating a trade deal with the United States, was put on hold for six months when Brussels and Washington agreed on a joint statement on trade in August 2025.
US President Donald Trump’s threat last week to impose new tariffs on eight European countries over Washington’s push to acquire Greenland had made the retaliatory package a handy tool for the EU to use had Trump followed through on his threat.
“With the removal of the tariff threat by the US we can now return to the important business of implementing the joint EU-US statement,” Commission spokesman Olof Gill said.
The Commission will soon make a proposal “to roll over our suspended countermeasures, which are set to expire on February 7,” Gill said, adding the measures would be suspended for a further six months.
“Just to make absolutely clear — the measures would remain suspended, but if we need them at any point in the future, they can be unsuspended,” Gill said.
