WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court for the second time to allow the government to freeze, for now, billions of dollars in foreign aid.
In an emergency request, the administration asked the justices to lift an order from a federal judge that requires the administration to spend funds Congress already budgeted for foreign aid.
The administration has moved aggressively to seize control of the executive branch and claimed broad authority to halt federal dollars appropriated by Congress for programs at odds with President Donald Trump’s agenda.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has generally been receptive to the administration’s claims, handing the president a series of technically temporary victories that have nevertheless had broad practical consequences. In emergency rulings, the justices have allowed Trump to fire independent agency regulators, cut grants to teacher training programs and remove protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants.
But in an earlier iteration of the foreign aid case in March, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with the three liberal justices, rejected Trump’s request to freeze nearly $2 billion while the case continued in the lower courts.
Lower court judges have issued a series of conflicting rulings as to whether Trump can refuse to spend the funds.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order temporarily ending programs around the world to determine whether they were “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the president.”
The AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Global Health Council, both nonprofit groups, challenged the freeze as an unconstitutional infringement on Congress’ power of the purse.
Solicitor General John Sauer raced to the Supreme Court this week, telling the justices that lawmakers and the president — not a single federal judge in Washington — should resolve disputes over how or whether to disperse federal funds appropriated by Congress.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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