Supreme Court won’t lift lower court order unfreezing $2 billion in foreign aid funding
Washington – The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to stop a lower court order that required the Trump administration to be enlightened of nearly $2 billion in foreign aid funds, thus providing the money with a path to groups working overseas at the State Department and U.S. international development agencies.
The High Court’s ruling is over Chief Justice John Roberts suspended Last week, the High Court was given more full consideration of the Trump administration’s request to interfere with the ongoing court struggle to stop 90 days on foreign aid funds.
The Chief Justice issued a brief administration last Wednesday, with midnight foreign aid payment approaching ahead of a court-wide bid for President Trump’s emergency relief.
The Superior Court allocated the Trump administration’s demands 5-4, with Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the Trump administration’s demands with three liberals. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh objected to the denial.
“Is a single district judge who may lack jurisdiction a power to force the U.S. government to pay (possibly forever loss) $2 billion in taxpayer dollars?” Alito wrote in a disagreement by another three other conservative judges. “The answer to this question should be an emphasis on ‘no’, but most people in this court will obviously think of it. I was shocked.”
The lawsuit is underway in the case, and the district court is scheduled to hold a hearing on Thursday regarding the contractor’s demand for longer relief.
The court pointed to those ongoing hearings, “Local courts should clarify the obligations that the government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order and to properly consider the feasibility of any compliance time.”
The order is one of the first orders issued by the Supreme Court, with dozens of legal challenges posed to the president’s policy through the federal court. So far, the High Court has been asked to intervene in another case, due to Mr. Trump’s removal from the head of the federal agency responsible for overseeing the whistleblower. it Delay the president’s request To allow him to fire that official special attorney, Hampton Dellinger, in the ongoing legal proceedings, but has not yet held further.
Legal struggle against foreign aid
The Trump administration came to the Superior Court for emergency relief last week after U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali Order the government Pay all invoices and reimbursement requests to USDA and State Department contractors for work completed by February 13.
Ali is responsible for the 90-day pause to Mr. Trump, a group of nonprofits and businesses that receive foreign aid funds, and believes that the freeze is an unconstitutional exercise of the president’s power. Last month, he temporarily Prohibit the government Stop diplomatic assistance funds. Then, after the State Department and U.S. International Development contractors said last week that they still hadn’t received the money owed, Alibaba issued an order requiring the Trump administration to comply with his earlier February 13 directives and to pay for all invoices and funding requests completed before that.
The judge asked the government to pay the contractor by 11:59 pm on February 26.
The Justice Department filed an order to appeal Ali to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, but refused to intervene after finding the order could not be filed.
exist Seek emergency relief Attorney Sarah Harris, who set out from the Supreme Court, asked the court to temporarily stop the district court’s orders – the government suspended the deadline for foreign aid funds last Wednesday night – and then threw it away completely.
Harris said Alibaba’s orders are not limited to payments to nonprofits and companies that filed the case, but require more broadly, requiring it to pay nearly $2 billion under thousands of payment requests.
“This new order that requires huge foreign currency payments in less than 36 hours violates the privileges of the executive branch,” she wrote in the Supreme Court’s documents. “The president’s power is at its highest point in diplomatic affairs – the judiciary’s power is at its lowest point.”
The Acting Attorney General said that the local court order not only prevents the executive from “ensure that diplomatic aid payments are consistent with the president’s policy priorities, but also has not done basic diligence to ensure payments are free from fraud and abuse.”
Harris reiterated that in seeking emergency relief, the Trump administration wants to ensure agencies are not at risk of violating federal court orders that require payments for foreign aid. But restarting the funding requires multiple stages and multiple institutions, which is actually impossible to comply with Alibaba’s deadlines, she said.
“The administration is conscientiously responsible for complying with Article 3 court orders,” she said.
But lawyers for companies and nonprofit organizations Urge the Supreme Court The denial of Mr. Trump’s request is partly due to its lack of jurisdiction to review district court orders directing the government to comply with its interim measures.
They believe: “In this posture, the government’s application is equivalent to a permit to continue to defy.
Trump’s executive order on January 20 and subsequent State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development memorandums stopped foreign aid and ordered contractors to stop work “will “will “will “will “in “financial turmoil” and force them to lay off employees, lawyers said in a document. Some even face civil and regulatory violations of employment, evictions, bankruptcy and “physical threats to personnel,” the lawyer wrote in the Supreme Court’s application.
“The work of respondents promotes our interests abroad and improves — in many cases, actually savings — millions of lives worldwide. In doing so, this helps stop the disease and pre-diseases from reaching our shores,” the nonprofit wrote. “Government’s actions largely put this work aside. With Americans unemployed, business destruction, food decay and the suppression of critical health care, the public interest is severely weighed against the government. These are the outcomes of government actions.”
They also noted that the Trump administration has “never expressed concern about the feasibility of compliance” since the initial order issued by the District Court on February 13.
Alito wrote in his objection that the government had to pay $2 billion due to the Supreme Court order “not because the law requires it, but simply because the district court judge was ordered.”
“As the Supreme Court of the United States, we have a duty to ensure that the powers that the Constitution delegates to federal judges are not abused,” he wrote. “Today, the courts failed to fulfill this responsibility.”
Alito also challenged the scope of relief granted by the District Court, which required the federal government to pay all invoices and reimbursement requests for all work contracts completed before the interim restraining order was filed.
He wrote that the lower court “has no reason for universal relief to nonprofits here to be appropriate.”
“Today, the court made the most unfortunate mistake, rewarding a judicial arrogance and imposing a $2 billion fine on U.S. taxpayers,” Alito wrote. He added that while nonprofits and businesses questioned the funding freeze “a serious concern about non-payments for completing the work,” the relief ordered by the district court was a “too extreme response.”
“The federal court has many tools to resolve what a party calls non-case,” Alito said. “Self-reinforcement of its jurisdiction is not one of them.”
