The Chief Steps In And The Supreme Court Joins the Fight -- Who Decides When Taxpayer Funds Are Spent? The Executive Branch v. District Judges

The Global Health Alliance litigation is a case study of passive-aggressive lawyering at its finest by DOJ which danced the Plaintiffs and Judge into a no-win situation.

There are two cases that have been consolidated in the District Court in Washington D.C, and both are subject to all the comments below. Each case has multiple plaintiffs, but case “captions” for them list “Global Health Council” as the lead plaintiff in one, and “AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition” as the lead plaintiff in the other. Except where I specify otherwise, references to “Global” or the “cases” are meant as a collective reference to both cases and all the different plaintiffs in each case.

There are MANY twists and turns in the saga that is reflected in the dockets of the cases that are linked above.

The issue in both cases is the Trump Administration’s “blanket pause” on payments by the Treasury to fund grants/contracts coming out of USAID and/or the State Department. These are part of the foreign aid/assistance programs authorized by Congress to aid in the pursuit of U.S. foreign policy interests abroad. USAID and the State Department have thousands of employees worldwide whose job it is to administer these programs through both domestic and foreign contractors.

The cases are related to the case involving USAID employees being placed on paid leave when the pause in payments was announced. In moving to place thousands of workers on leave, the concern voiced by the new Administration was that a bona fide effort to evaluate the legitimacy of the spending by USAID could be undermined by USAID employees whose jobs might depend on the payments continuing. The union representing most of those workers filed suit to block the personnel moves.

Here is a basic timeline of events in the Global cases — some of these individual events are covered in more detail below. But seeing the sequence of events in chronological order can aid in understanding the inter-relationship of events to each other as explained in more detail below: