Trump Officials Ordered to Unfreeze Foreign Aid Per Prior Order

The Trump administration must immediately restore funding to USAID and several of its nonprofit partners that say they face “the prospect of ceasing operations this week” without the monetary aid, a US judge said following an emergency hearing Tuesday.

Judge Amir H. Ali of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said he would grant a motion to enforce his previously issued temporary restraining order, and required the government to demonstrate that it was in compliance with judicial directives. The US must present evidence of compliance to the court Wednesday.

The hearing follows Ali’s ruling last week that the federal government failed to comply with a temporary restraining order mandating continuation of foreign assistance through the US Agency for International Development and State Department. The judge declined at the time to hold Trump officials in contempt of court.

But the Global Health Council and several other groups, including the American Bar Association, said in an emergency filing Monday that the government is still ignoring Ali’s order. Their motion was the third such entreaty in the pair of cases accusing President Donald Trump of defying court orders that counteracts his policy goals.

“You’re now 12 days in and you can’t answer me whether any funds that you’ve kind of acknowledged were covered by the court’s order have been unfrozen?” Ali asked counsel for the government Tuesday.

“Provisions are underway for the joint status report on compliance,” counsel for the government, Indraneel Sur, said in response.

On Feb. 13 Ali ordered the State Department and USAID to not suspend or pause foreign aid payments it had contractually agreed to.

The order covered the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Journalism Development Network—represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group—as well as the American Bar Association’s coalition of businesses and nonprofits, represented by Arnold & Porter LLP.

However, that order said the government could enforce the terms of those contracts, which the administration took as permission to terminate the agreements if their provisions allowed it.

But Ali said Feb. 20 that his order didn’t allow Trump and officials “to simply continue their blanket suspension of congressionally appropriated foreign aid pending a review of the agreements for whether they should be continued or terminated.”

Two days later he also rejected a government bid to stay the order pending appeal, according to the docket

Monday’s emergency motion in Global Health Council v. Trump said the plaintiffs “are facing new and mounting irreparable harms that threaten their very existence and which require emergency relief prior” to a preliminary injunction hearing set for next month.

The case is Glob. Health Council v. Trump, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00402, 2/25/25.