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 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 Mr. 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 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.
Lower court judges have issued a series of conflicting rulings as to whether Mr. Trump can refuse to spend the funds.
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.
Judge Amir Ali of the Federal District Court in Washington said in March that the administration had unlawfully delayed the money and required the administration to allow funds to flow, including nearly $4 million for global health and more than $6 million for H.I.V. and AIDS programs.
Then, earlier this month, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided with Mr. Trump, finding that the global health organizations that challenged the freeze lacked grounds to bring the lawsuit. In a 2-1 ruling, the appeals court said that only the Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog controlled by Congress, could challenge the administration’s withholding of funds.
Under the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, the office can sue to force the release of funds a president refuses to spend. But it has not yet taken that step.
A larger complement of judges on the D.C. Circuit then refused to allow the three-judge panel ruling to immediately take effect while the full 10-member appeals court decided whether to rehear the matter. (One judge has recused herself.)
That prompted Solicitor General D. John Sauer to race 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.
“Given the vast sums involved and the significance of the case to the separation of powers and U.S. foreign policy, the district court’s holdings, if allowed to stand, would clearly warrant this court’s attention, and those holdings would not survive review,” Mr. Sauer wrote, asking the justices for a decision by Sept. 2.
The district court’s ruling, he added, “would open the floodgates to suits by private parties who compete for appropriated funds and who seek to impose judicial oversight on executive spending decisions at odds with the process Congress prescribed.”
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