Trump appeals court order to restart foreign aid as Catholic groups remain without funds

People wait outside a distribution point to receive aid rations in Oromia Region, Ethiopia, in February 2018. / Credit: Will Baxter/Catholic Relief Services

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Feb 26, 2025 / 16:50 pm (CNA).

President Donald Trump’s administration is appealing a federal court decision that ordered the government to resume foreign aid grants by late Wednesday evening as many Catholic groups that receive those grants are still without funds.

The attorney general’s office filed an appeal late Tuesday night after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ordered the administration to supply those funds by 11:59 p.m. on Wednesday. The same judge, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, had ordered the government to resume its foreign aid funding on Feb. 13. However, the Trump administration has not complied with that order.

Numerous Catholic organizations have lost grant money due to the foreign aid funding freeze, including Catholic Relief Services and Jesuit Relief Services.

Ali ruled in his decision that Trump’s blanket freeze on foreign aid funding likely violates the Administrative Procedure Act and violates the separation of powers because Congress approved the money to be used in foreign aid programs.

In its appeal, the administration asserts that the judge’s order forces the government to “pay arbitrarily determined expenses on a timeline of the district court’s choosing” and claimed the court “creates a payment plan” that is contrary to the president’s obligations under Article II of the Constitution and the principles of “federal sovereign immunity.”

The court filing also argues that United States Agency for International Development (USAID) leadership has determined that the court’s order to resume funding “cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the [court].”

“The district court has ordered the federal government to pay nearly $2 billion in taxpayer dollars within 36 hours, without regard to payment-integrity systems that would ensure that the monies claimed are properly owed, without regard to the federal government’s meritorious arguments to the contrary, and without so much as addressing the government’s sovereign-immunity defense,” the court filing states.

Additionally, the administration claims in its appeal that the judge’s order will cause “grave and irreparable harm to the government” because it “has no practical mechanism to recover wrongfully disbursed funds that go out the door to entities that have complained that they are near insolvency.”

On his first day in office on Jan. 20, Trump issued an executive order to pause all foreign aid grants for 90 days. He argued in the order that the funding was not aligned with the interests of the United States and worked to “destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”

During Biden’s administration, some foreign aid programs were leveraged to promote LGBTQI+ policies in other countries and to pressure governments into ending discrimination based on a person’s “gender identity and expression.” One priority was to combat so-called “conversion therapy practices,” which include therapies that discourage a person from adopting a “gender identity” inconsistent with the person’s biological sex.

Some programs also include humanitarian assistance provided by faith-based organizations like Catholic Relief Services and Jesuit Relief Services, which offer food, shelter, health care, and other services to people in foreign countries. 

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Department of State would exempt certain programs from the foreign aid funding freeze.

A spokesperson for Jesuit Relief Services (JRS) told CNA that Trump’s stated mission to make the world “respect and admire America … has been obscured by a slapdash ban on foreign assistance carried out by people without the institutional expertise or constitutional authority to do so.” 

“Making matters worse, these bureaucrats are doing this despite orders from President Trump and Secretary Rubio to grant waivers to restore funding for lifesaving projects,” a spokesperson said. 

“Weeks later, few, if any, of these are back online, in obvious contradiction to the White House’s directives. The result includes things like American-grown food rotting at ports and already-purchased vaccines not being administered — literally hundreds of millions of dollars wasted,” the spokesperson said.

The representative from JRS said that those who report to Trump and Rubio must “follow their directives” and court orders “to resume funding these initiatives obligated by our federal government and already paid for by American taxpayers.”

“If they do, we and other Catholic organizations should shortly be able to resume providing food assistance, shelter, and medical care in parts of the world like Ethiopia and Iraq, where there have been lengthy and devastating displacement crises,” the spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Catholic Relief Services declined to comment. 

CNA reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.