A lower court had found that the president’s cuts were unlawful.
A federal appeals court ruled on Aug. 13 that the Trump administration may cut billions of dollars in foreign aid funds that Congress previously approved.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit overturned 2–1 a ruling by a federal district judge who held that President Donald Trump was violating the separation of powers by impounding, or failing to pay out, monies appropriated by Congress.
The panel found that the associations and grant recipients who sued to release the funds do not have valid legal grounds to bring a lawsuit in the case.
The new ruling is a victory for Trump, who is attempting to wind down the U.S. Agency for International Development and withhold funding for programs not favored by his administration. Critics have called the effort a power grab by the executive branch of the government.
The new decision came in the case known as Global Health Council v. Trump.
Writing for the panel, Circuit Judge Karen L. Henderson recounted the facts of the case.
On Jan. 20, Trump issued Executive Order 14169, freezing foreign aid spending for 90 days. Grant recipients and associations sued to free up the government funds, arguing that the president violated the federal Administrative Procedure Act and the Constitution.
The district court granted a preliminary injunction requiring the government to make fiscal 2024 foreign aid funding available.
The Administrative Procedure Act is a federal statute enacted in 1946 that governs administrative law procedures for federal executive departments and independent agencies. Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nev.), now deceased, said at the time that the law was “a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated in one way or another by agencies of the federal government.”
The district court erred when it granted the injunction because the grantees who brought the lawsuit are not permitted to bring “a freestanding constitutional claim” when the legal violation they alleged is of a statute, Henderson said.
The grantees also may not pursue a claim under the Administrative Procedure Act because doing so is barred by the federal Impoundment Control Act, she said.
That statute requires the president to notify Congress before withholding funds and give Congress an opportunity to formally disapprove the withholding.
The grantees cannot “reframe [the] fundamentally statutory dispute as an ultra vires claim either,” she said, referring to a claim that a government official is acting beyond his legal authority.
Only the office of the Comptroller General of the United States, a congressional accountability body, can sue under the Impoundment Control Act to release the funds appropriated by Congress, she said.
“Accordingly, we vacate the part of the district court’s preliminary injunction involving impoundment,” Henderson wrote.
The panel sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings consistent with the opinion.
Circuit Judge Florence Y. Pan filed a dissenting opinion.
After Executive Order 14169 was issued, executive branch officials “immediately suspended and subsequently terminated thousands of foreign-aid grants, with catastrophic consequences for the grantees and the people that they serve,” Pan said.
The court majority erred when it held that the grantees cannot press their claim that the Constitution has been violated, Pan said. The majority incorrectly determined that when the president declines to spend funding appropriated by Congress “based on policy disagreements, that is merely a statutory violation and raises no constitutional alarm bells,” she said.
In addition, she said the panel is disregarding the fact that the Supreme Court and the D.C. Circuit have held that the executive branch lacks authority “to disobey duly enacted statutes for policy reasons.”
“The majority opinion thus 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,” Pan said.
The grant recipients and associations that brought the appeal could still ask the full D.C. Circuit to review the panel’s ruling.
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