- calendar_today August 24, 2025
.
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday night to let it block billions of dollars in foreign aid spending that Congress had already appropriated. The emergency appeal by administration lawyers returns the USAID case to the high court for the second time in six months.
Nearly $12 billion in foreign aid is set aside for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), much of it money that has to be spent by September 30 or lost. President Donald Trump has acted with relative speed since returning to the White House in January, signing an executive order on his first day back in office instructing federal agencies to cease nearly all foreign aid disbursements. Trump has said he wants to stop “waste, fraud, and abuse” in overseas spending as part of a more general government-wide effort to reduce spending.
The executive order was promptly challenged in court, and in February, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali in Washington, D.C., blocked the effort. The White House had a duty to continue disbursing money for USAID projects Congress had already agreed to fund, Judge Ali held, and he issued an injunction requiring the Trump administration to resume payments on billions of dollars in USAID grants.
But the Trump administration fought back. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit took up the case again earlier this month, this time overturning Ali’s injunction by a 2-1 vote. Writing for the majority, Judge Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, said the plaintiffs in the case, foreign aid groups who want their grant payments restored, had not properly stated a legal claim that would allow them to sue the administration. Henderson wrote in the ruling that the groups lacked a proper “cause of action” under a doctrine known as impoundment.
Although the appeals court ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration, it has yet to issue an official mandate enforcing its order. That would happen typically when a party files a motion and the opposing side does not respond within a set period of time, usually several days. As a result, Ali’s prior order — and the payment schedule he laid out in his earlier ruling — is technically still in effect. That means the administration is scrambling to prevent itself from being forced to pay out the full $12 billion by the end of the fiscal year on September 30.
In the Tuesday night emergency filing, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who filed the emergency request with the Supreme Court on Tuesday, said the government otherwise would be forced to “rapidly obligate some $12 billion in foreign-aid funds” by the September 30 deadline. The solicitor general, in his request, argued that courts should not be resolving the dispute at all, instead leaving the matter to the political branches of government to figure out.
“Congress did not upset the delicate interbranch balance by allowing for unlimited, unconstrained private suits,” Sauer wrote in the filing. The solicitor general added that “any lingering dispute about the proper disposition of funds that the President seeks to rescind shortly before they expire should be left to the political branches, not effectively prejudged by the district court.”
The foreign aid groups and individuals challenging the administration in the case argue exactly the opposite. They say the president cannot prevent the spending of money that Congress has already appropriated. The key statutory provisions they point to in making that case include the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), a 1970s-era law designed to curb executive overreach in federal spending, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court weighed in on a nearly identical dispute. A narrow 5-4 ruling at the high court temporarily blocked the aid payments from resuming in the narrow circumstances of the case, but the appeals court eventually ruled in the administration’s favor. The stakes and the money on the line have only increased in the time since the administration filed this new emergency request as the court’s current term enters its final stretch.
