Supreme Court Rebuffs Administration Effort to Halt Foreign Aid Funding

A sharply divided Supreme Court today rebuffed the Trump Administration's effort to halt foreign aid funding for work already done. The ruling also suggests that as many as five justices won't abide the Trump Administration's gambits.

The case, Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, arose when a district court ordered the Administration to make payments for foreign-aid work that was already completed pursuant to valid contracts at the time of the court's earlier temporary restraining order. (The earlier TRO enjoined the Administration from halting all foreign development assistance. The more recent order--the one at issue here--ordered the Administration to make payments only for work already done.) The Trump Administration asked the Court to intervene, and Chief Justice Roberts issued a temporary stay. Today the Court vacated that stay and reimposed the district court's temporary restraining order that the Administration pay for foreign-aid work already done.

This doesn't mean the case is over. The district court is still considering the plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction. In today's order, the Supreme Court instructed the district court to "clarify what obligations the Government must fulfill to ensure compliance with the temporary restraining order, with due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines."

This also doesn't necessarily mean that five justices ruled against the Administration on the merits. In typical style for this kind of ruling, the Court did not say exactly why it vacated the Chief's earlier order and reinstated the district court TRO. For some or all in the majority, this might've only been because TROs aren't typically appealable, and they declined to treat the TRO as an (appealable) preliminary injunction. If so, the ruling doesn't necessarily foretell anything about the merits. (Still, we might reasonably guess that justices who think the TRO went too far would go out of their way to treat it as a (appealable) preliminary injunction, and those that think it was proper would see it as an (unappealable) TRO.)

In any event, the bottom line is a sharp rebuke to the Trump Administration and its efforts unilaterally to cut funding that Congress authorized (and, in this case, that was already due for work already completed). If, as many think, the Trump Administration's strategy in gutting USAID and unilaterally halting foreign-aid funding was a test run for how it might gut other agencies, the Court's ruling signals that the Court--or at least five justices--may not always go along.

Justice Alito dissented, joined by Justices Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. Justice Alito argued that the district court TRO was effectively a preliminary injunction, that it violated sovereign immunity by ordering the government to pay out money, and that it swept too broadly by ordering the Administration to pay out to entities that were not parties to this litigation.