The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia tossed out the February order of a Biden-appointed district judge on Wednesday and delivered the Trump administration a big win.
How it started
President Donald Trump ordered a pause in foreign aid on his first day back in office, eliciting backlash from beneficiaries abroad and vested interests at home.
Trump, convinced that the U.S. “foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” ordered a 90-day pause in foreign aid, affording his administration an opportunity to review relevant programs “for programmatic efficiency and consistency with United States foreign policy.”
‘The grantees failed to show they are likely to succeed on the merits.’
Secretary of State Marco Rubio subsequently suspended new funding obligations for the State Department; terminated thousands of grant awards; and shuttered the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Grantees of foreign-assistance funds promptly sued to get their hands on nearly $4 billion for global health programs and over $6 billion for AIDS programs that had been appropriated by Congress to be disbursed by the State Department and USAID.
Foreign-born U.S. District Judge Amir Ali helped them in February to keep the gravy train moving.
Ali, a Biden appointee, issued a universal injunction — the kind the U.S. Supreme Court determined on June 27 “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts” — that barred the Trump administration from “suspending, pausing, or otherwise preventing the obligation or disbursement of appropriated foreign-assistance funds in connection with any contracts, grants, cooperative agreements, loans, or other federal foreign assistance award that was in existence as of January 19, 2025.”
How it’s going
In a 2-1 decision on Wednesday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia did what the Supreme Court refused to do in March: vacate Ali’s order.
The majority on the panel — comprising a George H.W. Bush appointee and a Trump appointee — concluded that “the district court abused its discretion in granting a preliminary injunction because the grantees failed to show they are likely to succeed on the merits.”
The majority also determined that “the grantees lack a cause of action to bring their freestanding constitutional claim” and “have no cause of action to undergird their [Administrative Procedure Act] contrary-to-law claim.”
‘We will continue to successfully protect core Presidential authorities from judicial overreach.’
In her dissenting opinion, Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee and daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, accused her colleagues of reframing the case to help the government.
“The majority concludes that the grantees lack a constitutional cause of action — an issue that the government did not mention in its opening brief and did not fully develop even in its reply brief,” wrote Pan.
The Biden-appointed judge wrote that the government instead argued that the grantees lack a statutory cause of action to force President Donald Trump to obligate the funds in question.
Pan also suggested that the majority opinion “misconstrues the separation-of-powers claim brought by the grantees, misapplies precedent, and allows Executive Branch officials to evade judicial review of constitutionally impermissible actions.”
Blaze News has reached out to the State Department for comment.
Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the victory, noting, “In a 2-1 ruling, the DC Circuit lifted an injunction ordering President Trump to spend hard-earned taxpayer dollars on wasteful foreign aid projects. We will continue to successfully protect core Presidential authorities from judicial overreach.”
“Today’s decision is a significant setback for the rule of law and risks further erosion of basic separation-of-powers principles,” stated Lauren Bateman, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group who represented some of the grantees. “We will seek further review from the court, and our lawsuit will continue regardless as we seek permanent relief from the administration’s unlawful termination of the vast majority of foreign assistance.”
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