USAID Funding Blocked by Trump Heads to Supreme Court

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Trump administration lawyers on Tuesday night filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court to ask the justices to allow them to block billions of dollars of foreign aid spending that Congress had already approved. The filing, which immediately sends the legal battle over U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funding back to the high court for the second time in six months, would bar the foreign aid money from going out before the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.

The underlying controversy involves nearly $12 billion in aid that was already set aside for USAID; however, it still needs to be disbursed before the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year. After quickly returning to the White House after an election defeat in January, President Donald Trump took action on his first day back to sign an executive order telling the federal government to stop disbursing “nearly all” foreign aid. The president, who had promised for years to stop sending money to foreign nations, called it part of his effort to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” in foreign spending.

Trump’s order, as it relates to USAID funding, was quickly challenged in federal court; in February, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali in Washington, D.C. blocked the administration’s effort. Judge Ali ruled that the White House was required to release money already set aside for Congressionally approved projects. Ali then issued an order that forced the Trump administration to start reissuing payments on billions of dollars in USAID grants.

The Trump administration appealed, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit took up the case earlier this month. In a 2-1 ruling, the appeals court vacated the lower court injunction from Judge Ali. In her opinion, for the majority, Judge Karen L. Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, ruled that the plaintiffs in the case — foreign aid groups trying to get their grant payments reinstated — had no proper legal standing to sue the administration. Henderson wrote that the plaintiffs had no cause of action in the case under a legal theory known as the doctrine of impoundment.

Trump had won an important victory in the case with the appeals court ruling, but the court has yet to issue a formal mandate for its ruling to take effect. This delay in effect has left Judge Ali’s ruling — and the schedule for USAID funding payments he ordered — still on the books. The Trump administration, thus, is in a race against the clock to not be forced to pay out the full $12 billion in foreign aid funding before the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year.

Emergency Filing with Supreme Court

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed the emergency request to the Supreme Court on Tuesday and said that unless the court acts the government will be forced to “rapidly obligate” some $12 billion in foreign-aid funds by Sept. 30. “In the best of circumstances, a case of this kind would not be appropriate for judicial resolution on an expedited basis,” Sauer said in the filing, “because the timing of the suit and the administrative actions at issue are such that the case does not satisfy Article III standing requirements.”

He added that “Congress did not upset the delicate interbranch balance by allowing for unlimited, unconstrained private suits,” and “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 plaintiffs in the case, a group of foreign aid groups whose grants are funded through USAID money, argue that the opposite is true. They say the president does not have the authority to stop money that Congress has already appropriated to be spent. The key laws, as they see them, are the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) of the 1970s, a law designed to curb executive abuses in federal spending, and the Administrative Procedure Act. Allowing the administration to unilaterally stop payments after Congress has already appropriated them, the plaintiffs say, would violate both laws.

The Supreme Court had already been asked to step into a similar dispute earlier this year, and it issued a narrow 5-4 ruling. This time, with billions of dollars of foreign aid funding on the line and less than a month to go before the fiscal year ends, the Supreme Court has been asked to wade back into the fight.

For Trump, the case is the latest salvo in a broader war to change U.S. spending priorities and to have greater control over where foreign aid goes. For the aid groups, it’s a fight for their very existence: projects that have already been planned and have been approved for funding in places all over the world could be in danger of being cut back or shut down entirely if they don’t get the funding they had been expecting before the end of the fiscal year.

With the appeals court’s decision hanging in limbo and the administration seeking a quick resolution, the high court’s actions with this latest emergency filing could determine not only the fate of $12 billion of foreign aid funding but also set a precedent for how much authority a president has in the management of congressionally appropriated money.