Supreme Court rebuffs Trump in fight over foreign aid bills

The Supreme Court has rebuffed the Trump administration’s request to lift a lower-court order that required the government to quickly pay nearly $2 billion that contractors and aid groups say they’re owed for U.S.-backed foreign-aid projects.

In a 5-4 ruling Wednesday, the high court’s majority noted that a deadline the lower judge set last week to pay the bills had already passed, and the justices urged the judge to show “due regard for the feasibility” of any future deadline he might set.

The ruling is a significant but potentially short-lived victory for operators of foreign aid programs who warned of devastating consequences from the administration’s abrupt freeze and dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. A broader legal fight over the future of the agency is continuing to play out in the lower courts.

Two of the court’s Republican appointees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with the court’s liberal justices in declining to disturb the judge’s order. The court’s other four GOP appointees dissented.

The ruling — announced in a terse single paragraph from the majority — represents the first time the Supreme Court has weighed in substantively on one of the president’s policies in his second term. Last month, the high court considered President Donald Trump’s bid to fire a federal watchdog but effectively punted that dispute without immediate action.

And the foreign-aid ruling arrived after Trump warmly greeted the four justices who attended his speech at the Capitol Tuesday night, including Roberts, whom Trump appeared to thank and say “I won’t forget” during brief interactions on his way out of the Capitol.

The high court’s decision leaves in place an order issued last week by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, an appointee of former President Joe Biden in Washington, D.C., who gave the administration roughly 36 hours to unfreeze $2 billion in payments for work already performed by USAID contractors.

Ali set a deadline of 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 26 after aid groups complained that the government was ignoring his earlier orders to broadly unfreeze funds for foreign aid, issued after he concluded that the blanket stoppage likely violates the law. The judge issued two follow-up directives to enforce his original order after contractors complained the administration had defied his initial ruling or sought to circumvent it.

The Trump administration filed an emergency appeal of Ali’s Feb. 26 deadline, asserting that it was impossible to unfreeze the funds so quickly. Just hours before that deadline, Roberts temporarily suspended the deadline so that the full court would have time to consider the administration’s appeal.

The Supreme Court’s ruling sets the tone for a Thursday hearing Ali has scheduled to consider whether his order to unfreeze foreign aid should be extended. The ruling could also preview future fights at the high court in foreign-aid freeze cases and a slew of others triggered by early Trump administration actions.

Justice Samuel Alito, in his eight-page dissent Wednesday, ripped the majority for “a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris” by Ali. The four justices said the contractors raised “serious concerns about nonpayment” for their work but that Ali’s solution was “too extreme.”

Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, appeared to credit the Trump administration’s argument that ordering the immediate payment of the nearly $2 billion in invoices created a serious prospect that the government would never be able to get that money back if the payments were later found to be unjustified or the product of fraud.

The cases the Supreme Court acted on Wednesday stem from a 90-day pause to foreign aid programs that Trump ordered on his first day back in office in January. Contractors and aid organizations that carry out such programs sued, arguing that Congress had allocated billions of dollars for the work and a halt to payments could cause many aid providers to go out of business and endanger vulnerable aid recipients worldwide.

Trump administration officials acknowledged that few aid payments went out in the wake of Ali’s original order but contended that they were not defying it. Instead, they said they’d embarked on a broad review of all contracts and grants and taken action to terminate most of them on an individual basis and in a fashion permitted by the judge’s order. In recent days, Trump officials have sent notices canceling more than 90 percent of such projects.

However, aid groups argued that review was just a cover for continuing the original freeze. They said the real reason the Trump administration couldn’t comply was that Trump appointees rapidly dismantled USAID, shutting down existing payment systems and firing workers who processed contract paperwork.

The broader legal dispute over foreign aid funding raises questions about the president’s power to halt spending he opposes even if Congress has already appropriated the funds.