OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
9:45 AM – Saturday, September 6, 2025
A federal appeals court has set President Donald Trump back on his attempt to withhold nearly $5 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, siding with a lower court’s decision.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals voted to uphold a lower court’s decision that Trump’s intentions to cut billions of dollars of funding without approval from Congress were illegal. Justice Cornelia Pillard, appointed by former President Barack Obama, and Justice Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, voted in favor of the lower court’s decision. Judge Justin Walker, appointed by Trump, dissented, creating a 2-1 decision.
This follows the ruling from Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, who wrote a 43-page decision criticizing the Trump administration’s refusal to spend funds that were lawfully approved.
“Defendants have given no justification to displace the bedrock expectation that Congress’s appropriations must be followed and that absent a ‘claim of unconstitutionality that has not been rejected by final Court order, the Executive must abide by statutory mandates,’” Ali wrote.
White House budget chief Russ Vought announced the plan in August. Trump attempted to cut the State Department and USAID’s $4.9 billion of funding using a rare “pocket rescission,” which is believed by some legal experts to be an unlawful seizure of funds that attempts to bypass Congress’s “power of the purse.”
“There is not a plausible interpretation of the statutes that would justify the billions of dollars they plan to withhold,” Ali stated in his ruling.
The administration appealed the ruling immediately on Thursday to the D.C. court.
Vought has argued that the president has 45 days after requesting a rescission to withhold funds, which would extend past the end of the fiscal year on September 30th. The White House asserts that this strategy was used before in 1977.
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