The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected President Trump’s emergency request to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid as part of his efforts to slash government spending.
The court’s brief order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. It said only that the trial judge, who had ordered the government to resume payments, “should clarify what obligations the government must fulfill.”
But the ruling is one of the court’s first moves in response to the flurry of litigation filed in response to President Trump’s efforts to dramatically reshape government. The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal members to form a majority.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the four dissenting justices, said the majority had gone profoundly astray.
“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) $2 billion taxpayer dollars? “ he asked. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”
The administration halted the aid on Jan. 20, President Trump’s first day in office. Recipients and other nonprofit groups filed two lawsuits challenging the freeze as an unconstitutional exercise of presidential power that thwarted congressional appropriations for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The groups said the frozen funds have created cascading crises, threatening critical medical care around the world, leaving food rotting in warehouses, ruining businesses and risking the spread of diseases and political instability.
“One cannot overstate the impact of that unlawful course of conduct: on businesses large and small forced to shut down their programs and let employees go; on hungry children across the globe who will go without; on populations around the world facing deadly disease; and on our constitutional order,” lawyers for Global Health Council, a membership organization of health groups, wrote in one of the suits.
Judge Amir Ali of the Federal District Court in Washington, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden, issued a temporary restraining order on Feb. 13 prohibiting administration officials from ending or pausing payments of appropriated money under contracts that were in place before Mr. Trump took office.
He said the administration had offered no explanation for the blanket suspension of aid Congress had directed be paid.
But administration officials seemed to evade if not defy that order, saying they were entitled to continue to conduct case-by-case review of the grants and contracts and halt or approve spending one at a time.
The plaintiffs repeatedly returned to court, asking Judge Ali to enforce his order. In a ruling on Feb. 25, he ordered the officials to pay more than $1.5 billion in already completed aid work. He set a deadline for midnight the next day.
Just hours before the deadline, the Trump administration filed in an emergency application to the Supreme Court arguing the judge had overstepped his authority.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., acting on his own, promptly issued an “administrative stay” temporarily blocking the orders. Such stays are interim measures meant to give the justices some breathing room while the full court considered the matter. Wednesday’s order lifted the stay.
Justice Alito wrote that the court should not allow the lower court judge’s order to remain in place.
“The government must apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste — not because the law requires it, but simply because a district judge so ordered. As the nation’s highest court, we have a duty to ensure that the power entrusted to federal judges by the Constitution is not abused. Today, the court fails to carry out that responsibility.”
In a brief filed on Friday, the challengers wrote that the administration was wrong at every step of its legal analysis.
“The government comes to this court with an emergency of its own making,” the brief said, adding: “By forcing thousands of American businesses and nonprofits to suspend their work, and by halting disbursements for work that they had already performed, even work that already had been reviewed by the government and cleared for payment, the government plunged respondents into financial turmoil.”
The brief added that the administration had challenged only Judge Ali’s order requiring the money to be disbursed and not his original order preventing the funding freeze. Even if the government won, the brief said, the administration would not be able to proceed with the funding freeze.
In an executive order on Jan. 20, Mr. Trump temporarily halted thousands of programs around the globe to assess whether they are “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” the order said. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”