‘Trump overstepped constitutional authority in fund freezing’

Washington: President Donald Trump overstepped his constitutional authority in freezing almost all spending on US humanitarian and development work abroad, a federal judge ruled, saying the administration could no longer simply sit on the tens of billions of dollars that Congress has appropriated for foreign aid.

But Judge Amir H Ali stopped short of ordering Trump officials to use the money to revive the thousands of contracts they have abruptly terminated for US aid and development work around the world. Ali’s ruling Monday evening came hours after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the administration had finished what has been a six-week purge of programmes of the six-decade-old US Agency for International Development,

cutting 83% of them.