Yesterday the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals decided the case of Global Health Council et al. v. Trump et al. on a 2-1 vote. The case arose out of the freeze on U.S. Agency for International Development spending that President Trump ordered in the earliest days of his administration. The plaintiffs are organizations that received grants from USAID, and allege that they have been damaged because the administration has impounded or ceased those grants.
Some have hailed the decision as a major win for the Trump administration, but the grounds for the court’s ruling were narrow. The court held that the plaintiff grantees have no standing to sue on the basis of the administration’s alleged violation of the Impoundment Control Act:
The district court erred in granting that relief because the grantees lack a cause of action to press their claims. They may not bring a freestanding constitutional claim if the underlying alleged violation and claimed authority are statutory. Nor do the grantees have a cause of action under the [Administrative Procedure Act] because APA review is precluded by the Impoundment Control Act (ICA). And the grantees may not reframe this fundamentally statutory dispute as an ultra vires claim either. Instead, the Comptroller General may bring suit as authorized by the ICA. Accordingly, we vacate the part of the district court’s preliminary injunction involving impoundment.
The court held that a litigant may not do an end run around limited remedies specified in a statute (here, the Impoundment Control Act) by alleging that the executive’s alleged violation of that statute was also unconstitutional. Under this holding, the only remedy for any violation of the IPA is a lawsuit brought by the Comptroller General, who is the head of the Government Accountability Office and, while appointed by the president, reports to Congress. As I understand it, the GAO has said that the administration’s withholding of aid to Ukraine violated the ICA. Whether the Comptroller General will assert such a claim in court remains to be seen.
As I understand it, it is clear that President Trump did not follow procedure set out in the Impoundment Control Act. The real issue, I believe, is whether that law is constitutional: that is, what are the respective rights of the executive and Congress when it comes to appropriating and spending money? The government did not raise a constitutional issue in the Global Health Council case, and the Supreme Court has never ruled on whether the president has the inherent constitutional power to decline to spend money appropriated by Congress, especially when it relates to foreign affairs.
As has often happened in such cases, the two judges who formed the majority in this case were appointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush and Trump, while the dissenting judge is a Joe Biden appointee.
In the end, the only way to reduce government spending is for Congress to appropriate less money. In that regard, the Rescissions Act of 2025, which cut only $9.4 billion in previously-appropriated funds, was deeply disappointing. That amounts to a little over one-tenth of one percent of federal spending. A Republican Congress will have to do much better than that.
