The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court for a third time in a convoluted but consequential case, asking the justices on Monday to let it freeze billions of dollars in foreign aid that had been appropriated by Congress.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, told the court that a federal judge’s order requiring $4 billion in payments by the end of the month raised “a grave and urgent threat to the separation of powers.” The administration’s emergency application asked the court justices to pause the order.
The application was the latest in a barrage of emergency requests by the administration seeking broad executive authority, including the power to halt federal spending appropriated by Congress for programs at odds with President Trump’s agenda.
The Supreme Court, with six conservative justices, has proved receptive to most of 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 Mr. Trump to fire independent agency regulators, cut grants to teacher training programs and remove protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants.
Still, in an earlier iteration of the foreign aid case, in March, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, along with the three liberal justices, rejected Mr. Trump’s request to freeze nearly $2 billion while the case continued in the lower courts.
On his first day in office, Mr. 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’s power of the purse.
The case has bounced around the court system. The latest application concerns a ruling last week from Judge Amir Ali of the Federal District Court in Washington that said the administration had “given no justification to displace the bedrock expectation that Congress’s appropriations must be followed” and requiring the administration to allow the funds to flow.
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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