The Supreme Court’s Wednesday ruling that the Trump administration must heed a lower court’s order to release frozen foreign aid was a welcome but confusing development for humanitarian and development organizations around the world, as they waited to see if thousands of canceled contracts would be restarted.
For weeks, the Trump administration has worked to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, the federal agency chiefly responsible for disbursing foreign aid.
Thousands of nongovernmental groups and companies that once partnered with it have been in limbo since the administration canceled over 90 percent of contracts, neutered the agency’s payments system and reneged on promises to pay for work already completed.
The organizations that brought the lawsuit have insisted that the court’s ruling ought to force the Trump administration to restore all foreign aid funding. But the administration has been adamant that it was within its rights to decimate the agency.
Here’s where things stand, and how this court order is expected to play out.
Why has foreign aid been frozen?
President Trump has argued that some U.S.A.I.D. programs were counter to American interests, too “woke” and too expensive. On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order to pause all foreign aid for 90 days, pending a review of programs to determine whether they aligned with his foreign policy objectives.
The administration has stated in its court filings that the review was “largely completed,” after it announced its decision last week to terminate funding for about 5,800 contracts. Those contracts comprised over 90 percent of U.S.A.I.D.’s remaining caseload. On Wednesday, however, Pete Marocco, the State Department official who has been overseeing the cuts to the agency, told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that the review was in its early stages.
The total funding allotted to U.S.A.I.D. programs before the cuts amounted to less than 1 percent of the overall federal budget.
Is any money still flowing?
At this point, extremely little.
Shortly after Mr. Trump issued his executive order, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, allowed programs providing lifesaving humanitarian assistance to avoid the 90-day freeze and review.
But in practice, almost all of the programs that had received waivers were unable to access funds to continue operating. Even a program to help contain an Ebola outbreak in Uganda was unable to access the money it needed.
In recent days, a trickle of organizations received notice that their contract termination notices had been reversed. Among the revived contracts was one to procure H.I.V. medicines and manage supply chains to ship those drugs to countries with high rates of infection. A program to spray long-acting insecticide inside the homes of people in areas of Kenya and Uganda with some of the highest rates of malaria infection in the world was also permitted to resume, until April 30.
But the changes in status have been scattered and erratic. According to Tom Hart, the head of InterAction, a U.S.-based alliance of international nongovernmental aid organizations, some groups whose contracts were canceled were notified that they had been reinstated and then canceled again.
And nearly none of the reversals of terminations have come with restored funding, obliging partners to front the funds through corporate lines of credit and other sources, if they wish to resume their work.
How much foreign aid will be restored?
This is the million — or really, billion — dollar question.
The Supreme Court’s one-paragraph order kicked the matter of determining how much foreign aid had to be restored back to Judge Amir H. Ali of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It was his order to release the funding that the Trump administration had appealed to the Supreme Court. The administration’s broad cancellation of contracts happened after Judge Ali’s order — and it is not clear if the Supreme Court’s ruling could force the administration to restore all the contracts it canceled.
Democrats on Capitol Hill, who see the cuts to U.S.A.I.D. as flouting the will of Congress, which created the agency, insist that the ruling is absolute.
“They’re defying the constitutional rules of Congress. Are they also going to defy the constitutional obligations by the Supreme Court?” asked Representative Julie Elizabeth Johnson, Democrat of Texas, after members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee met with Mr. Marocco on Wednesday.
But the Trump administration has insisted that it has the authority, separate from the president’s executive order, to end programs that it deems counter to U.S. interests. And Republican allies insist the court could not take that power away.
“We don’t interpret that the court should read that in that way,” said Representative Brian Mast, Republican of Florida and chairman of the foreign affairs panel. “We’re going to continue to fight it.”
What does this mean for the future of U.S.A.I.D.?
A variety of lawsuits challenging the cuts to the development agency have been working their way through the courts. Wednesday’s ruling was in a case initially brought by the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Journalism Development Network, challenging the administration’s aid freeze as organizations that had been promised those funds.
But a parallel suit from unions representing U.S.A.I.D. employees was not able to stop the Trump administration from laying off the agency’s contractors and putting the vast majority of direct hires on leave, as part of a plan to reduce the agency’s staffing from about 10,000 to mere hundreds of staff members deemed “essential.”
Without the majority of its staff, it is unclear how the agency would administer programs if they were restored.
What happens next?
Judge Ali will hold a hearing on Thursday to consider whether to turn his temporary restraining order largely lifting the administration’s freeze into a more muscular judicial command, a preliminary injunction. He has said that he intends to issue his ruling “with full dispatch.”
The temporary order is set to expire on Monday or when Judge Ali rules on the motion for a preliminary injunction, whichever comes sooner.
Should he grant the injunction, the administration will doubtless appeal again, first to a federal appeals court in Washington and then, if need be, to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, Mr. Marocco also told lawmakers Wednesday that his staff was planning criminal referrals against individuals the administration believes misused foreign aid funds, according to people familiar with the closed-door meeting.
Adam Liptak, Stephanie Nolen and Robert Jimison contributed reporting.
