A federal judge has set a new deadline of Monday for the Trump administration to pay a large number of backlogged invoices for foreign aid programs, but he has significantly reduced the amount of money that must be sent out by then.
U.S. District Judge Amir Ali issued the new directive on Thursday, just a day after the Supreme Court denied the administration’s emergency appeal of an earlier order Ali issued in a pair of lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s broad freeze on foreign aid.
The judge’s previous order had set a February 26 deadline for the State Department to send out an estimated $2 billion in payments owed to contractors and grant recipients who run aid programs abroad.
However, the February 26 deadline passed while the administration’s appeal was pending, and the high court returned the case to Ali on Wednesday, instructing him to “clarify” the government’s obligations immediately.
Ali’s new order gives the Trump administration until 6 p.m. Monday to pay the plaintiffs in the lawsuits all of the money they are owed on invoices and other requests to draw down grant funds submitted before February 13.
Contractors and grantees who are not parties to the litigation are not subject to the new Monday deadline, so any money owed to them will most likely remain frozen.
It is unclear how much money the administration will have to disburse by Monday, but people involved in the litigation say it is at least several hundred million.
During a more than four-hour hearing Thursday afternoon, Ali repeatedly stated that he was seeking to comply with the Supreme Court’s directive to show “due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.”
“I intend to take that instruction very seriously,” the judge stated.
According to a court filing on Thursday, State Department officials worked overnight Wednesday to approve approximately $70 million in payments to the plaintiffs in the lawsuits.
Ali, a former President Joe Biden appointee, said the volume of approvals gave him confidence that the State Department could send the remaining bills to the plaintiffs by working at the same pace over the next four days.
“The government’s made a good showing by getting that,” Ali told reporters. “I do appreciate the government’s taking action on that front.”
Justice Department attorney Indraneel Sur said the agencies may have difficulty executing the payments over the weekend, when many banks are closed, but Ali said he did not think that would be a problem because the most recent batch of payments was approved overnight.
The majority of Thursday’s hearing focused on whether Ali should issue a preliminary injunction extending a temporary restraining order issued last month against Trump’s foreign-aid freeze, which he imposed shortly after taking office. The order is set to expire on Monday.
The Justice Department claims that the freeze has been lifted, and officials have conducted a case-by-case review of each contract and grant, terminating many for specific reasons.
“The pause is essentially finished,” Sur said, arguing that the court has no reason to continue to block a blanket policy that is no longer in effect.
But Stephen Wirth, an attorney for some of the aid contractors, said the review was a ruse to allow the pause to continue despite Ali’s order to stop it.
Defendants did not resume foreign assistance. Instead, they doubled down,” Wirth said, asking the judge to overturn the contract terminations. “I do not think here that the government has changed course.”
Ali did not immediately rule on the aid groups’ request for an injunction to extend the restraining order, but he said he was considering “benchmarks” to process the entire backlog of past-due payments.
