Chief Justice John Roberts granted a temporary pause on Tuesday to a lower court order requiring the Trump administration to spend billions in foreign aid.
The administrative stay was granted a day after the Trump administration filed the request to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket seeking a stay of the order by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali last week, which ordered the spending of $4 billion in Congressionally-approved foreign aid. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to stay Ali’s order pending appeal last week, leading the Justice Department to petition the Supreme Court for a stay.
Roberts gave the groups suing to compel the president to spend the funds until 4 p.m. Friday to file their response to the DOJ’s emergency petition.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued in his petition Monday that Ali was forcing President Donald Trump to spend the $4 billion in foreign aid funds he wants to cancel via a “pocket rescission.” A pocket rescission is when a president sends a rescission request to Congress at the end of the fiscal year so that the funds will expire before the legislature is likely to consider the request.
“While proposed rescissions are pending, Presidents do not spend the funds, for obvious reasons: it would be self-defeating and senseless for the Executive Branch to obligate the very funds that it is asking Congress to rescind,” Sauer wrote.
“Yet the new injunction would force the Executive Branch to start obligating those funds at breakneck speed to meet the September 30 deadline, even as Congress is considering the rescission proposal and before its 45 days to do so elapse,” he added.
Roberts has granted the stay for now, but the Supreme Court could lift it at any time once it has fully considered the emergency request. Despite the temporary pause, the groups suing said in their brief Monday that an administrative stay “could effectively resolve this case in the government’s favor without giving this Court a chance to decide whether the extraordinary remedy of a stay pending appeal is warranted.”
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“These irreparable harms far outweigh any short-duration burden on the government of taking preparatory steps to obligate funds that Congress mandated spending eighteen months ago,” the opposition brief had argued.
Roberts’s Tuesday decision to grant an administrative stay in the case comes a day after he granted an administrative stay in a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s firing of a Democrat-appointed FTC commissioner. The administrative stay in the FTC commissioner firing case comes as the high court considers the DOJ request to issue a firmer stay, allowing her to be fired, while the lawsuit plays out in lower courts, or take the case up now before it has made its way through lower courts.
