Written and published by NOTUS

The secretary of state has made public promises to release funds, and an administration official has made private promises to do the same. Still, groups like the Jesuit Refugee Service are waiting for aid.

As of Wednesday morning, the Jesuit Refugee Service was among the many recipients of congressionally-approved foreign aid frozen out of funding.

But unlike the many organizations who have now taken the Trump administration to court for its blunt cuts to USAID, it took the White House at its word — even getting assurances from Trump administration officials that if they file the right paperwork, the money would return.

JRS has not gotten the money.

“I eagerly look at my email every morning when I wake up, and, you know, at one o’clock in the morning,” Kelly Ryan, president of the JRS, said dryly on Tuesday afternoon. “I look at it to see if we’ve gotten the money.”

In a tumultuous opening to an administration bent on radical change in Washington, aid organizations were among the very first exposed to the new normal. Trump officials and Republican elected officials are openly saying they are willing to break government systems, if that means they can build it back in their image. Or, in the case of much of USAID, not build it back at all.

In Ryan’s world, that means a program seemingly in keeping with the administration’s priorities – around $5 million in aid dollars to fund a program that helps refugee families in South and Central America establish lives in Colombia rather than moving in other directions, including north to the U.S. southern border – is shuttered. Other JRS programs assisting Christian refugees in places like Iraq are on life-support, dependent now on desperate fundraising efforts from private donors.

That puts it on the reported list of hundreds of groups still not being funded despite multiple public promises and court interventions. And, in Ryan’s case, despite a readiness to support the administration’s reform drive.

The American people “wonder about fraud, waste, abuse, and they don’t want it. I totally agree, so does the President,” Ryan said. “There’s a lot of misinformation about what USAID did, and certainly there’s areas of USAID which should definitely be improved. But this wholesale attack on foreign assistance is deeply troubling.”

NOTUS spoke with several NGO leaders and officials in recent days for a look at ongoing upheaval that has largely faded from the headlines. What emerged was a picture of life in the Twilight Zone – nothing is as it appears, for anyone involved.

That includes D.C. federal court Judge Amir Ali, who first ordered the restoration of all frozen funds on February 13 through the use of a temporary restraining order. At a hearing Tuesday, Amir sounded amazed money is still not flowing.

“Twelve days into the TRO, you can’t give me any facts about funds being unfrozen under the TRO?” the judge reportedly asked administration lawyers.

The case remained chaotic through Wednesday, with NGOs suing the Trump administration saying in a filing officials were not abiding by the order to restart payments – and the administration arguing it had finished its review of foreign aid and was beginning to terminate contracts and lay off USAID staff. A judge had yet to adjudicate the arguments late Wednesday afternoon.

The upshot in the short term was likely another round of delays for groups that have been told many different things since January when the funding freeze began.

In a private “listening session” on February 13 at the State Department, hundreds of people from the aid world filed into an auditorium and stood for the Pledge of Allegiance led by Pete Marocco, State’s new pointman on foreign aid. Marocco told the assembled the administration had launched a “zero-based review” of foreign aid. He said the expected end date for the review would come in April.

“When you don’t cut off the money, people don’t give you honest answers that you need to determine whether or not a program can continue,” he told the groups, according to accounts from the attendees verified by NOTUS.

“That is why you have seen our approach of pausing all of the assistance, with the exception of waivers and special exceptions,” he said. At the time, many were still waiting for communications about whether they qualified for a waiver while they sat in the meeting.

And some groups with waivers at the meeting had still not received their funds when Marocco spoke, something he eventually addressed with a pledge of his own. The administration had stopped money going out to stop “nefarious actors” who had tried to disburse it after the stop work order, he said, and the process of rooting that out had disrupted the payment system used by NGOs and similar aid implementers. But he promised the end was near.

“We’re going to have that pretty good by Tuesday of next week,” he said, meaning February 18.

Administration critics say there is a clear effort to subvert the intention of judges and Congress and expand executive authority to let the White House do basically whatever it wants. Some aid workers fall into this category, with some groups raising money off their lawsuits and forceful pushback to the president.

But others are perplexed. One committed Republican working in the Washington foreign aid world told NOTUS there is plenty of skepticism about foreign aid infrastructure even among those who spend their lives implementing it. But the neverending story of the administration promising payments, and then those payments failing to materialize, doesn’t make Trump’s team look like a competent reform partner, the Republican said.

“This Trump administration is all about ‘promises made, promises kept,’” they said, but there’s now a pattern developing that is “losing people’s trust.”

JRS’ Ryan continues to work the system, waiting for someone to explain what is going to happen with her authorized funds and when.

“I try to focus on the mission, and the mission is helping people. So that’s what I’m focused on. There’s a lot of chatter, there’s a lot of background noise, there’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth,” she said. “But what I think is, are we helping refugees today?”

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