The Trump administration has not fully complied with a court order pausing the freezing of foreign assistance grants and contracts, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali last week ordered the administration to allow the disbursement of U.S. foreign assistance after hearing claims from federal contractors challenging an executive order signed by President Donald Trump pausing nearly all foreign assistance.
Ali determined that a "blanket suspension of congressionally appropriated foreign aid" had caused irreparable harm to the contractors and was likely not allowed under the Administrative Procedure Act.
Earlier this week, the administration said in a notice of compliance that the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development had reviewed the thousands of contracts and grants it had canceled as part of the aid freeze and determined that “substantially all” of the terminations were allowed under the terms of the contracts.
In response, Ali suggested Thursday that the administration was not fully abiding by his court order pausing the funding freeze and instead searching for new ways to justify its pause on large amounts of aid.
“By enjoining Defendants and their agents from implementing any directives to undertake such blanket suspension, the Court was not inviting Defendants to continue the suspension while they reviewed contracts and legal authorities to come up with a new, post-hoc rationalization for the en masse suspension,” Ali wrote.
The judge said the Trump administration has yet to offer evidence to rebut the charge that its blanket suspension of foreign aid will cause irreparable harm or that it has fully considered the implications the pause could have on interests that rely on the aid.
"The Court stands prepared to consider such arguments and evidence at the preliminary injunction stage," Ali wrote. "However, to the extent Defendants have continued the blanket suspension, they are ordered to immediately cease it."
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The judge stopped short of holding the administration in contempt.
A spokesperson for the White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
The day of his second inauguration, Trump signed an executive order pausing all "foreign development assistance" funding for 90 days. The order directed all federal department and agency heads to immediately pause new obligations and disbursements of aid to foreign countries and nongovernmental organizations.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, days after being confirmed, ordered an immediate stop to nearly all foreign assistance funded through the State Department and USAID.
The foreign aid pause case is not the first time of his second term that the Trump administration has been found by a judge to be in violation of a court order. Earlier this month, a federal judge in Rhode Island ruled that the Trump administration had violated his order halting a broad federal funding freeze, which included a pause to foreign aid but also to domestic grants and loans. The memo enacting that pause, which came from the Office of Management and Budget, was rescinded in late January.
