A federal appeals court will allow Donald Trump’s administration to continue withholding billions of dollars in foreign aid, dealing a major blow to aid groups and potentially teeing up a critical Supreme Court test to the president’s attempts to control funding approved by Congress.
The three-judge panel — which includes judges appointed by Trump and George H.W. Bush — overturned a district court’s injunction that ordered the administration to fork over money for food, medicine and other aid that the president blocked on his first day in office.
Aid groups that sued the administration to unfreeze foreign assistance did not have standing to bring the case, and “the district court erred in granting that relief because the grantees lack a cause of action to press their claims,” judges wrote on Wednesday.
The court’s only Democrat-appointed judge on the panel accused the court of supporting the president’s “unlawful behavior.”
“At bottom, the court’s acquiescence in and facilitation of the Executive’s unlawful behavior derails the ‘carefully crafted system of checked and balanced power’ that serves as the ‘greatest security against tyranny — the accumulation of excessive authority in a single branch,’” wrote Judge Florence Y. Pan, who was appointed by Joe Biden.
The administration “immediately suspended and subsequently terminated thousands of foreign-aid grants, with catastrophic consequences for the grantees and the people that they serve,” Pan wrote.
Plaintiffs in the case will now ask for the full 15-member appeals court panel to review the case, which could then land at the Supreme Court.
“Today’s decision is a significant setback for the rule of law and risks further erosion of basic separation of powers principles,” Public Citizen Litigation Group attorney Lauren Bateman said in a statement. “In the meantime, countless people will suffer disease, starvation and death.”
A recent study in The Lancet estimated Trump’s cuts could contribute to the deaths of 14 million million people by 2030, including as many as 5 million children under the age of 5.
