Judge stops immediate shutdown of small US agency for African development

A judge barred the Trump administration on Thursday from immediately moving to shut down a small federal agency that supports investment in African countries on Thursday.

US District Judge Richard J Leon in Washington issued the order hours after the filing of a lawsuit by the president and CEO of the US African Development Foundation.

Ward Brehm said in a complaint that he directed his staff on Wednesday to deny building entry to staffers from billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency and Pete Marocco, the deputy administrator for the US Agency for International Development.

DOGE and Trump do not have the authority to shut down the agency, which was created by Congress, Brehm said in the complaint.

The order from Leon, who was appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, bars Brehm from being removed or DOGE from adding members to the board over the next few days.

Brehm also said that days after President Donald Trump targeted the agency in a Feb. 19 executive order that aims to shrink the size of the federal government, staffers from DOGE tried to access the organization's computer systems.

When USADF learned that DOGE was there to kill the agency, USADF staff refused DOGE access to cancel all grants and contracts, said the complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement, Entitled, rogue bureaucrats have no authority to defy executive orders by the President of the United States or physically bar his representatives from entering the agencies they run.

The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration mandated DOGE and Musk, the world's richest man whose businesses have federal contracts, to root out waste, fraud and abuse and to help reduce the nation's debt load.

Brehm said in his complaint that DOGE and Marocco, a Trump political appointee helping shutter USAID, also recently targeted the Inter-American Foundation, a federal agency that invests in Latin American and the Caribbean.

On Tuesday, DOGE said on X that all but one employee at IAF had been let go and its grants cancelled, including funding for alpaca farming in Peru, for vegetable gardens in El Salvador and for beekeeping in Brazil.

Trump is also targeting the U.S. Institute of Peace, a Washington-based think tank, and the Presidio Trust, which oversees a national park site next to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Both entities, which were created by Congress, continue to operate and say they are compiling information requests from the White House.

The National Endowment for Democracy, a private nonprofit that helps combat authoritarianism around the world, sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, saying in a complaint that it had been denied access to its funding, something that has never occurred before in the Endowment's forty-two-year existence.

In 2023, it reported issuing $238 million in grants, including through the International Republican Institute, where Secretary of State Marco Rubio formerly served as a board member.