The American Bar Association, along with groups like the Global Health Council and Small Business Association for International Companies, has filed a lawsuit over the Trump administration's shuttering of United States Agency for International Development.
The organization called the move "an unlawful and unconstitutional exercise of executive power." In his executive order pausing all foreign said, President Donald Trump said USAID was "antithetical to American values."
The plaintiffs said Trump's executive order halted the flow of funding to existing partners, plunging those organizations into turmoil and costing thousands of Americans their jobs.
"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," the plaintiffs said.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Defendants include Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, and the acting deputy administrator for management and resources at USAID, Peter Marocco.
"Neither the President nor his subordinates have authority to thwart duly enacted statutes and substitute their own funding preferences for those Congress has expressed through legislation," the plaintiffs wrote, saying the administration's executive orders "violate basic precepts of administrative law, numerous federal statutes, and bedrock separation-of-powers principles."
The plaintiffs cited a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act and the separation of powers doctrine.
HIAS, Management Sciences for Health, Chemonics International, Dai Global and Democracy International have also joined the suit.
"The Court must hold these actions unlawful and set them aside," the plaintiffs wrote.
Sam Barron ✉
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