Biden-Appointed Judge Hamper's Trump Admin's Efforts to Freeze Foreign Aid

A federal judge appointed by former President Joe Biden ordered on Thursday that the Trump administration temporarily lift a funding freeze that has led to the shutdown of U.S. aid overseas. Concretely, judge Amir Ali issued the ruling late Thursday, upholding a lawsuit introduced by two health organizations getting funding from the U.S. abroad.

The Trump administration has not "offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, which set off a shockwave and upended" contracts with groups across the world "was a rational precursor to reviewing programs," Ali said, making reference to the government's argument about needing to freeze the program to review which should be kept and which discarded. The ruling applies to existing contracts before Trump's executive order.

Another judge also ruled on Thursday that his order to halt the firing of most USAID employees will stay in place for another week. He said he will issue a written ruling soon on the future of the pause. Carl Nichols, appointed by Donald Trump, questioned whether employees put on leave in high-risk areas would be safe. A Justice Department attorney could not provide detailed plans on the matter. Top USAID officials are stranded in Washington without homes or funding, NPR reported.

The push is also making it harder to track if humanitarian assistance funded by tax money is being misused, the agency's inspector general's office in a recent report. In some cases, it added, it will make it more difficult to make sure that money is not going to terror groups, especially as the members of the unit within the agency tasked with that job has been told not to report to work.

The agency's independent watchdog said that even though it has "identified significant challenges and offered recommendations to improve Agency programming to prevent fraud, waste, and abuse" in the past, the recent decisions have had negative effects on oversight.

"Recent widespread staffing reductions across the Agency ... coupled with uncertainty about the scope of foreign assistance waivers and permissible communications with implementers, has degraded USAID's ability to distribute and safeguard taxpayer-funded humanitarian assistance," reads a passage of the report, per CNN.

The outlet explained that funds going to places like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza require "partner vetting" to make sure they don't end up in the hands of terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah or ISIS.

"While USAID OIG has previously identified gaps in the scope of partner vetting, 10 USAID staff have reported that the counter-terrorism vetting unit supporting humanitarian assistance programming has in recent days been told not to report to work (because staff have been furloughed or placed on administrative leave) and thus cannot conduct any partner vetting," the report added. Consequently, USAID is now more "susceptible to inadvertently funding entities or salaries of individuals associated with U.S.-designated terrorist organizations," it added.