It’s been roughly one year since U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly moved to shutter multiple congressionally chartered foreign aid offices, but there is still little clarity on whether his actions were legal under U.S. law—even as much of the damage is now irreversible.

The effort by Trump and his billionaire former advisor Elon Musk to unilaterally dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and fire more than 10,000 employees plus thousands more contractors prompted multiple lawsuits from the impacted employees, contractors, and aid grantees. More lawsuits related to Trump’s push to defund and shutter other smaller offices related to foreign affairs, such as the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, are still ongoing. There are more than half a dozen related lawsuits winding their way through the judicial system.

It’s been roughly one year since U.S. President Donald Trump abruptly moved to shutter multiple congressionally chartered foreign aid offices, but there is still little clarity on whether his actions were legal under U.S. law—even as much of the damage is now irreversible.

The effort by Trump and his billionaire former advisor Elon Musk to unilaterally dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and fire more than 10,000 employees plus thousands more contractors prompted multiple lawsuits from the impacted employees, contractors, and aid grantees. More lawsuits related to Trump’s push to defund and shutter other smaller offices related to foreign affairs, such as the U.S. Institute of Peace, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, are still ongoing. There are more than half a dozen related lawsuits winding their way through the judicial system.

Congress continues to absent itself from the legal arena, where it could—if it wanted to—have the most influence by asserting that the Trump administration is violating the legislature’s constitutional rights to set both policy and federal spending levels. Instead, Republican lawmakers who control both the House and Senate have pursued a meeker approach: voicing occasional criticisms of Trump’s usurpation of their prerogatives, passing spending bills that make significantly smaller funding cuts to U.S. foreign assistance and international relations programs than those sought by the White House, and quietly hoping that the administration will disburse those funds as intended—and not illegally withhold them, as critics claimed happened with billions of aid dollars in 2025.

With Democratic lawmakers effectively sidelined until they can wrest back control of one or both chambers of Congress in the upcoming November midterm elections, legal defense of the congressional power of the purse appears likely to be left to an array of labor unions, civil society groups, and jilted aid grantees.

The difficulties that these plaintiffs have experienced over the last year in receiving timely legal redress has shined a light on vulnerabilities that weren’t previously well understood in the American justice system when it comes to the enforcement of key democratic concepts like due process and the separation of powers, according to interviews with attorneys involved in the lawsuits.

“I wish that whether it was Congress, whether it was the judiciary, that more had been done to push back on that destruction from the executive branch in the early days, before the offices were physically shut down and people were sent back to the U.S.,” said Karla Gilbride, an attorney with Public Citizen, a left-leaning nonprofit that is representing two federal labor unions that are suing over the mass USAID firings.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the foreign aid cases outside of its legal filings.

The issue of standing—i.e., who the courts find has the legal capacity to bring a lawsuit by arguing that they have been harmed by a government action—came up repeatedly in 2025 during initial rulings, whose collective outcome effectively allowed the White House and the State Department to dismantle USAID and terminate thousands of foreign aid grants approved by the Biden administration. These executive actions took place without congressional approval, even though it was the legislative branch that created USAID and many of the other foreign affairs and grant offices that are still on the chopping block.

Legal tools that plaintiffs thought would help them in their lawsuits, such as a 1946 administrative procedures law that governs the process for enacting U.S. agency changes and a 1974 budget law that established a process and oversight protocols for the executive and legislative branches to resolve funding disputes, haven’t been as useful as initially hoped in thwarting the Trump administration’s sweeping changes to the U.S. foreign-policy bureaucracy.

A major lawsuit brought by a coalition of foreign aid organizations, including the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), that are seeking the reinstatement of terminated USAID grants has seen its legal strategy repeatedly set back on time-consuming technicalities. Those include legal questions over which U.S. spending law, statute, or even the Constitution itself the plaintiff’s claims should fall under.

In a determination last July, a federal appeals court in Washington found that only the comptroller general, the top accountability officer for the U.S. government, has the standing to bring an impoundment violation lawsuit against the executive branch. The next month, the Supreme Court also sided with the Trump administration in an interim ruling by allowing it to unilaterally cancel $4 billion in expiring foreign aid funds that had been frozen since February 2025.

For now, the plaintiffs in the AVAC case are waiting to see if a federal circuit court will overturn the appeals court ruling that stated their constitutional claims were not appropriate.

Nick Sansone, an attorney with Public Citizen who is counsel on the AVAC case, said that it wasn’t clear just how much foreign aid money is still frozen by the Trump administration, but the figure is likely in the billions of dollars. In addition to getting the funding unstuck and disbursed, the plaintiffs hope to receive a ruling that says what the administration has been doing by freezing and withholding large sums of congressionally directed spending is illegal and must stop.

“We think that as a matter of policy, it is very important for foreign assistance to continue, but our claims were predicated on the president’s failure to abide by the will of Congress,” Sansone said. “If, under the statute, Congress says X amount is going to foreign aid, even if we think that X should be higher or someone else thinks that X should be lower, our legal opinion is that is a judgement that Congress gets to make … it’s the job of the president and the administration to do what Congress has told them to do.”

There have also been disputes over judicial jurisdiction. Lawsuits brought a year ago to the U.S. district court by the labor unions, which were representing USAID foreign service officers, civil service staff, and some of the agency’s contractors, argued that the Trump administration shutting down the foreign aid agency was illegal because the action lacked congressional approval. A judge dismissed those claims, arguing that other legal forums such as federal claims court had jurisdiction on the matter. Those labor-related cases are being appealed.

“We’re continuing to fight the case because we think the district court judge was wrong on the law, and we hope that decision will be reversed on appeal, but we know that a lot of damage has already been done,” Gilbride said. “It has been very discouraging. It is people’s livelihoods and jobs, and it is also people’s lives. And the health of these innocent little children around the world, who are suffering needlessly, and that is just kind of hard to live with.”