The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday reaffirmed its ruling from earlier this month that the Trump administration can withhold $4 billion in foreign aid, though the order notes the decision “should not be read as a final determination on the merits” of the case.
White House budget director Russ Vought wrote on social media shortly after the order from the emergency docket was released that it represented a “Major victory.”
The new nine-page order doesn’t provide any additional details about why a majority of the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to rescind the funding without congressional approval.
But it does include a dissent written by Justice Elena Kagan that was supported by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, highlighting the stakes in the case.
“This emergency application raises novel issues fundamental to the relationship between the President and Congress,” Kagan wrote. “It arises from the refusal of the President and his officers to obligate and spend billions of dollars that Congress appropriated for foreign aid.”
The case, she wrote, brings up an issue the Supreme Court has never addressed.
“Deciding the question presented thus requires the Court to work in uncharted territory,” Kagan wrote. “And, to repeat, the stakes are high: At issue is the allocation of power between the Executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies.”
Kagan noted that since the case came to the justices on the emergency docket, they had less than three weeks to consider it.
“In a few weeks’ time—when we turn to our regular docket—we will decide cases of far less import with far more process and reflection,” Kagan wrote.
She goes on to disagree with the majority of the justices, saying the Supreme Court “should have denied this application, allowed the lower courts to go forward, and ensured that the weighty question presented here receives the consideration it deserves.”
Trump administration actions found illegal by watchdog
The ruling the Supreme Court posted Friday is similar to the one it released in mid-September when Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. overturned a district court ruling that would have required the Trump administration to spend the money.
The case now largely revolves around whether the White House budget office has the authority to send Congress a rescissions request during the last 45 days of the fiscal year, a maneuver the Government Accountability Office has called illegal.
When the White House asks Congress to cancel previously approved spending through a rescission, lawmakers are supposed to have 45 days to approve, modify, or ignore the request.
But Vought believes that any rescissions request sent up during those 45 days allows the White House to unilaterally cancel the funding, regardless of whether lawmakers agree or not.
The Trump administration asked lawmakers to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and various foreign aid programs this summer through a rescissions request.
Lawmakers mostly approved that proposal after preserving full funding for the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
The White House budget office then sent lawmakers a second rescissions request in late August, proposing they claw back billions of additional foreign aid dollars.
Neither the House nor the Senate has yet to vote on that proposal. But the Supreme Court’s ruling allows the White House budget office to withhold the funding anyway.
Democratic members of Congress react
House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Senate Appropriations Committee ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash., issued a joint statement after the court’s ruling calling on their GOP colleagues to protect the institution’s power over spending decisions.
“Congress can—and absolutely should—promptly reject President Trump and Russ Vought’s illegal effort to do an end run around the people’s elected representatives by passing a bill like the one we introduced last week,” they wrote. “Republicans should join Democrats to stand up for our power of the purse, rather than allow a president and an unelected bureaucrat who do not respect Congress or the Constitution to continue attacking our power to fight for the people back home that we represent.”
