Reporting from Washington<\/p>\n\n\n\n
March 6, 2025<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The Supreme Court on Wednesday\u00a0rejected President Trump\u2019s emergency request<\/a>\u00a0to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid in a closely divided decision indicating that the justices will subject his efforts to reshape the government to close scrutiny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The court\u2019s 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, \u201cshould clarify what obligations the government must fulfill.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the ruling represented one of the court\u2019s first moves in response to the flurry of litigation filed in response to Mr. Trump\u2019s efforts to slash government spending and take complete control of the executive branch. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although the language of the order was mild, tentative and not a little confusing, its bottom line was that a bare majority of the court ruled against Mr. Trump on one of his signature projects. The president\u2019s plans to remake American government, the order indicated, will have to face a court more skeptical than its composition, with six Republican appointees, might suggest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That, in turn, is likely to give rise to major rulings testing, and perhaps recalibrating, the separation of powers required by the Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the four dissenting justices, said the majority had gone profoundly astray.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDoes 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) two billion taxpayer dollars?\u201d he asked. \u201cThe answer to that question should be an emphatic \u2018No,\u2019 but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The order was released first thing in the morning, which is not typical when the court acts on emergency applications. The majority may have wished to avoid releasing the order thwarting Mr. Trump hours before he delivered his first address to the Congress since taking office in January.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The order was a single paragraph, most of it devoted to a recitation of the complicated procedural history of the case. It noted that the deadline for complying with the lower court\u2019s order requiring the disbursement of the funds had passed and that litigation would continue to make its way through the courts. For now, it concluded only that the lower court should clarify its previous order with \u201cdue regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reference to the passing deadline could be read to mean that the government has no immediate obligations until the trial judge takes further action. The instructions to the judge to clarify what the government must do, taking account of feasibility, suggested the case may well return to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Justice Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh saw the temporary action as far more significant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Got a news tip about the courts?<\/strong>\u00a0If you have information to share about the Supreme Court or other federal courts, please contact us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe government,\u201d Justice Alito wrote in a slashing eight-page dissent, \u201cmust apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste \u2014 not because the law requires it, but simply because a district judge so ordered. As the nation\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The administration halted the aid on Jan. 20, Mr. Trump\u2019s first day in office. His executive order<\/a> temporarily ended thousands of programs around the world to assess whether they were \u201cfully aligned with the foreign policy of the president of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Recipients and other nonprofit groups filed two<\/a> lawsuits<\/a>challenging the freeze as an unconstitutional exercise of presidential power that thwarted congressional appropriations for the U.S. Agency for International Development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOne 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,\u201d lawyers for Global Health Council,<\/a> a membership organization of health groups, wrote in one of the suits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Judge Amir Ali<\/a> of the Federal District Court in Washington, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., issued a temporary restraining order<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He said the administration had offered no explanation for the blanket suspension of aid Congress had directed be paid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But\u00a0administration officials<\/a>\u00a0seemed<\/a>\u00a0to 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plaintiffs repeatedly returned to court, asking Judge Ali to enforce his order. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Just hours before the deadline, the Trump administration filed in an emergency application<\/a> to the Supreme Court, arguing the judge had overstepped his authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chief Justice Roberts, acting on his own, promptly issued an \u201cadministrative stay\u201d 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\u2019s order lifted the stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a brief<\/a> filed on Friday, the challengers wrote that the administration was wrong at every step of its legal analysis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe government comes to this court with an emergency of its own making,\u201d the brief said, adding: \u201cBy 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Justice Alito, in his dissent, said the administration should not be thwarted by a single judge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cToday,\u201d he wrote, \u201cthe court makes a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Adam Liptak<\/a>\u00a0covers the Supreme Court and writes\u00a0Sidebar,<\/a>\u00a0a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.\u00a0More about Adam Liptak<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The move came after Chief Justice Roberts temporarily paused a trial judge\u2019s order requiring the administration to release more than $1.5 billion. By\u00a0Adam Liptak Reporting from Washington March 6, 2025 The Supreme Court on Wednesday\u00a0rejected President Trump\u2019s emergency request\u00a0to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid in a closely divided decision indicating that the justices […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001004,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16159"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001004"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16159"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16159\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16160,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16159\/revisions\/16160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldcampaign.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/ul>\n\n\n\n