Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. on Tuesday temporarily paused a federal judge’s ruling ordering the Trump administration to pay out $4 billion in foreign aid that had been appropriated by Congress.
The chief justice, acting on his own, issued an interim “administrative stay” of the ruling and ordered the challengers to file their brief by Friday. The full court is likely to rule on whether to issue a longer pause soon after that, probably next week, in a convoluted case that centers on presidential authority and Congress’s power of the purse.
Chief Justice Roberts’s order noted that the money is the subject of a proposal from the administration pending before Congress. That proposal, known as a “pocket rescission,” is a legally untested effort to claw back appropriated money by waiting so late in the fiscal year to make the request that lawmakers do not have time to reject it before the funding expires. It could make the court challenge moot.
The fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, before the 45-day period in which Congress is required to consider a rescission request from the White House. Republicans could bring the matter to a vote sooner, but party leaders have shown little appetite for resisting the president’s spending demands and asserting their own prerogatives.
The case before the Supreme Court has reached the justices three times. In an emergency application filed Monday, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, told the court that the judge’s order requiring it to spend $4 billion in payments by the end of the month raised “a grave and urgent threat to the separation of powers.”
Mr. Sauer noted the proposal before Congress. “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,” he wrote. “Yet the new injunction would force the executive branch to start obligating those funds at breakneck speed to meet the Sept. 30 deadline, even as Congress is considering the rescission proposal and before its 45 days to do so elapse.”