The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected President Donald Trump’s emergency request to withhold billions of dollars in foreign aid already approved by Congress. 

Recipients and other nonprofit groups filed two lawsuits challenging the freeze as an unconstitutional overreach of presidential power that thwarted congressional appropriations for USAID, the now-shuttered U.S. Agency for International Development.

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Marjorie Taylor Greene & Matt Gaetz want to abolish USAID for its “perverse ideology”
The bill cites USAID’s support for LGBTQ+ rights and women’s equality as proof of its “perverse ideology.”

Trump imposed a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid on his first day in office. Programs funded by USAID and other agencies were thrown into chaos or shut down entirely, including recipients of PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Program for AIDS Relief. 

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The 5-4 ruling was unsigned but earned a blistering dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the conservative minority.

“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) $2 billion taxpayer dollars?” he asked. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”

The funding at issue was to pay for work already completed through agency programs and is a fraction of the nearly $60 billion in previous foreign aid commitments now halted.

90% of USAID’s foreign aid, covering over 10,000 contracts, have been canceled by the administration, despite previous congressional authorization.

“One cannot overstate the impact of that unlawful course of conduct: on businesses large and small forced to shut down their programs and let employees go; on hungry children across the globe who will go without; on populations around the world facing deadly disease; and on our constitutional order,” lawyers for Global Health Council, a membership organization of health groups, wrote in one of the suits.

In his Day One executive order “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” Trump halted thousands of programs around the globe to assess whether they are “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”

“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” the order said. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”

Republicans have long held special contempt for USAID, describing its work promoting LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and health globally as a “perverse ideology.”

Prior to the funding freeze, the U.S. was the largest source of global funds for HIV prevention in low- and middle-income countries, according to GPC, the Global HIV Prevention Coalition.

In February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced exemptions for “life-saving” programs, but many of those waivers were not granted.

HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment efforts around the globe have been devastated by the cuts.

In Lesotho, Tanzania, and Eswatini, HIV programs have been terminated, according to the Global Health Council.

“These projects were supporting more than 350,000 people on HIV treatment, including nearly 10,000 children and more than 10,000 HIV-positive pregnant women,” it said.

In Ethiopia, the Ministry of Health was forced to terminate contracts for 5,000 workers across the country focused on HIV and malaria prevention and vaccinations.

In South Africa, thousands of USAID contracts for HIV programs in the country were permanently canceled “as the United States government abandons thousands of the most vulnerable people in South Africa and abroad,” said CHANGE, a health group alliance coordinating HIV/AIDS relief in the country.

5.5 million people in South Africa are recipients of HIV/AIDS treatment, the most in the world. 

PEPFAR is credited with saving more than 26 million lives globally since it was started in 2003.

Last week, Trump withdrew the United States from UNAIDS, the joint United Nations program on HIV/AIDS, according to The Associated Press.

A letter to the agency said funding was terminated “for the convenience of the U.S. government,” and the decision was made “for alignment with agency priorities and national interest.”

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