The Supreme Court has handed Donald Trump yet another victory by letting the administration continue to freeze billions of dollars in foreign aid while legal challenges against the government’s attempts to withhold public funding are ongoing.
Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday granted the administration’s emergency appeal to temporarily block a lower court’s order, setting up a major test of what opponents have called the president’s unconstitutional attempts to control public funding approved by Congress.
Last week, a federal judge ordered the administration to spend funds that were already approved by Congress for global aid programs before that money expires at the end of the month.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court that unfreezing aid poses a “grave and urgent threat” to the presidency.
“The president can hardly speak with one voice in foreign affairs or in dealings with Congress when the district court is forcing the executive branch to advocate against its own objectives,” he wrote.
Trump’s attempts to block billions of dollars in foreign aid have been met with outrage and lawsuits from global health and aid groups that have warned the administration’s actions have lethal consequences for life-saving missions around the world.
A recent study in The Lancet estimated Trump’s cuts could contribute to the deaths of 14 million people by 2030, including as many as 5 million children under the age of 5.
Several overlapping legal battles challenging Trump’s threats to the congressional power of the purse have bounced back and forth from the Supreme Court, which rejected Trump’s demand to continue blocking nearly $2 billion in foreign aid payments back in March. Last month, a panel of appellate court judges in D.C. opened the door for the administration to continue withholding billions of dollars in money for food, medicine and other aid that the president blocked on his first day in office.
But in his order last week, District Judge Amir Ali argued that the government has “given no justification to displace the bedrock expectation that Congress’s appropriations must be followed.”
The law is “explicit that it is congressional action — not the president’s transmission of a special message — that triggers rescission of the earlier appropriations,” Ali wrote last week.
The Trump administration is calling the judge’s ruling “unlawful.”
Sauer said Ali’s ruling “precipitates an unnecessary emergency and needless interbranch conflict” and urged justices to block it.
An estimated $10.5 billion of roughly $30 billion at stake is set to expire on September 30, according to Sauer.
The government intends to spend $6.5 billion of those funds before the deadline, but spending the remaining $4 billion would be a “grave and urgent threat” to the separation of powers, he argued.
