Washington — Chief Justice John Roberts late Wednesday granted the Trump administration’s request to put on hold a lower court order that required it to pay an estimated $2 billion in foreign assistance funds for State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development projects by midnight Wednesday.
Roberts, who oversees requests for emergency relief arising from cases in the District of Columbia, acted alone in halting the decision from a federal district judge issued Tuesday. The judge, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, gave the State Department and USAID until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday to pay its bills to contractors for work that had been completed before Feb. 13. The Trump administration had earlier in the night asked the Supreme Court to intervene in the dispute involving frozen foreign assistance funds.
Roberts gave the State Department and USAID contractors until noon Friday to respond to the Trump administration’s request.
In its bid for emergency relief from the Supreme Court, acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris said that Ali’s order covers an estimated $2 billion and said his Wednesday night deadline “moved the goalposts.”
“It is not tailored to any actual payment deadlines associated with respondents’ invoices or drawn-down requests, or anyone else’s. And it has thrown what should be an orderly review by the government into chaos,” she wrote.
Harris said that officials at the “highest levels of government” are involved in the matter and told the Supreme Court that the Trump administration is “undertaking substantial efforts to review payment requests and release payments.”
“The Executive Branch takes seriously its constitutional duty to comply with the orders of Article III courts,” she wrote.
But she warned that the district court’s deadline “makes full compliance impossible,” in part because restarting funding related to canceled or suspended agreements requires multiple steps, multiple agencies and documentary evidence.
The acting solicitor general requested an administrative stay, which would maintain the status quo, “to ensure that the agencies are not placed in the position of violating a federal court order requiring payments on thousands of requests within a 30-some-hour deadline, despite their efforts, while this court reviews the merits of their challenge.”
The Trump administration had already appealed the district judge’s order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and asked it to pause the lower court’s decision. But the D.C. Circuit had yet to act by Wednesday evening. Harris said the administration was seeking the Supreme Court’s intervention “in light of that extraordinary circumstance.”
But shortly after the Trump administration formally asked the high court for emergency relief, the appeals court declined the Trump administration’s request to pause the district court’s decision. The three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit said Ali’s orders could not be appealed.
Ali, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden in 2024, is overseeing the case brought by a group of companies, nonprofits and other organizations that receive money from the State Department and the USAID. He issued a temporary restraining order earlier this month that prevented the Trump administration from freezing foreign aid funds for contracts and other awards while proceedings continued.
But the contractors told Ali earlier this week that foreign aid funding was still not flowing despite his order, and sought prompt payment for work they completed weeks ago. The international development groups said they were owed millions of dollars for invoices and reimbursements, and warned the Trump administration’s failure to reinstate the funding forced them to furlough workers and end critical programs overseas.
Ali granted their motion to enforce his earlier order and gave the State Department and USAID 36 hours to pay the bills related to foreign aid contracts and grants.
Justice Department lawyers said in a separate filing that they estimated the payments covered by Ali’s order approached $2 billion, and for the challengers alone, the amount at issue was at least $250 million.
“This new order requiring payment of enormous sums in less than 36 hours intrudes deeply into the prerogatives of the Executive Branch and the president’s obligation under Article II to take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” they wrote in a filing to the D.C. Circuit.
Peter Marocco, director of foreign assistance at the State Department, said in a declaration that the administration is undertaking an “individualized review” of contracts and grants, and warned determining the course of those awards is a “cumbersome, multi-step process.”
He said that it would take the federal government “multiple weeks” to make the payments required by the district court judge.
“Restarting funding related to terminated or suspended agreements is not as simple as turning on a switch or faucet,” Morocco wrote in his declaration, adding that USAID and State Department payment systems are “complicated” and involve disbursements by numerous other agencies.
