A judge ordered the government to release frozen foreign aid.
Federal officials told a U.S. judge on Feb. 25 that they could not comply with his order requiring the release of frozen foreign aid within two days.
U.S. District Judge Amir H. Ali’s order, which gave a deadline of Feb. 26 at 11:59 p.m. ET, would mean paying at least $1.5 billion across some 2,000 outstanding and newly created requests for payment to the U.S. Agency for International Development, the official serving as deputy administrator for the agency said in a court filing.
It would also require paying at least $400 million to resolve outstanding payment requests to the State Department, Pete Marocco, the official, said.
“These payments cannot be accomplished in the time allotted by the Court and would instead take multiple weeks,” he wrote.
Earlier on Tuesday, Ali, in a hearing with government lawyers and attorneys representing the groups that sued over the freeze, was told that the groups had not yet been paid despite his multiple previousorders, including one on Feb. 13, mandating that the Trump administration unfreeze the foreign assistance.
“I’m not sure why I can’t get a straight answer from you on this: Are you aware of an unfreezing of the disbursement of funds for those contracts and agreements that were frozen before Feb. 13,” the Washington-based judge asked Indraneel Sur, the lawyer for the government, during the hearing. “Are you aware of steps taken to actually release those funds?”
“I’m not in a position to answer that,” Sur said.
It’s the second time a judge has found the Trump administration did not follow a court order. U.S. District Court Judge John McConnell in Rhode Island also found this month that the administration had not fully unfrozen federal grants and loans within the United States after he blocked sweeping plans for a pause on trillions of dollars in government spending.
The government has appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
