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WASHINGTON, D.C., February 28, 2025 — The Trump administration’s last-minute plea asking the Supreme Court to override a temporary restraining order requiring the administration to keep its commitment to recipients of foreign assistance funding should be rejected, according to a brief filed today by Public Citizen Litigation Group on behalf of AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and Journalism Development Network.
As detailed in the brief, the Trump administration has flouted the district court’s order for two weeks. Meanwhile, the freeze on payments to non-profits that engage in global humanitarian work is causing extraordinary and irreversible harm to the non-profits, their employees, and the people in need around the world who depend on their work.
“The district court gave the government every opportunity to demonstrate what steps it was taking to release foreign-assistance funding, as the TRO required, and to explain any practical impediments it faced in pursuing compliance,” the groups wrote in their filing. “But even by the time of the district court’s February 25 hearing—nearly two weeks after the TRO had issued—government counsel could not identify a single action the government had taken in the twelve days since the TRO to release frozen funds.”
The filing comes in response to the government’s Wednesday night application to the Supreme Court seeking expedited relief, which asked the justices to vacate a lower court decision requiring compliance with three previous orders directing the government to unfreeze foreign assistance programs that provide life-saving aid while the case proceeds.
“As the administration openly flouts multiple court orders, the people around the world who depend on U.S. foreign assistance programs face mass starvation, disease, and death,” said Lauren Bateman, attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group. “It is both a moral and legal crisis.”
In late January, President Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to freeze nearly all foreign assistance programs. Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered a halt on payments to those programs and directed grantees to stop their work.
On February 13, two days after Public Citizen filed suit, the federal district court judge ordered the Trump administration to resume payments to its development program partners and allow work to continue, at least while the case proceeded in court. Since then, in the face of the administration’s recalcitrance, the judge has reiterated his order three times. Although on Wednesday night the Court stayed a portion of the order requiring payments for past work to be paid by that night, the district court order remains in effect—and the administration continues to defy it.
“Congress created foreign assistance programs, directed the State Department and USAID to implement them, and appropriated funding to do so,” said Allison Zieve, director of Public Citizen Litigation Group. “The administration’s conduct flouts—not only the district court’s orders—but Congress’s constitutional role under the separation of powers at the heart of our Constitution.”
“We hope the Supreme Court will act quickly to reject the government’s effort to avoid complying with the law,” said Nicolas Sansone, attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group. “Every additional day that the government continues to defy the district court’s order compounds the pointless suffering caused by the administration’s arbitrary and unlawful foreign-assistance freeze.”
“This administration’s actions reflect an ignorance of the role of foreign assistance and a disregard of people’s lives in the United States and around the world,” said Mitchell Warren, executive director of AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. “The blanket freezes and now terminations of life-saving projects do not reflect an honest attempt to evaluate for efficiency, but rather an intentional effort to destroy decades of progress. But this is not just about PEPFAR. This is not just about the HIV response. This is about the rule of law.”
“Journalists in some of the toughest places for media are losing their jobs, their security, and possibly their visas because of the unlawful freeze,” said Drew Sullivan, publisher of Journalism Development Network. “The courts need to understand the damage that has been done and correct it.”
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About AVAC
AVAC is an international non-profit organization that provides an independent voice and leverages global partnerships to accelerate ethical development and equitable delivery of effective HIV prevention options, as part of a comprehensive and integrated pathway to global health equity. Follow AVAC on Bluesky and Instagram. Find more at www.avac.org and www.prepwatch.org.