Supreme Court Lets Trump Withhold $4 Billion in Foreign Aid Approved by Congress

The US Supreme Court on Friday gave President Donald Trump the green light to withhold billions of dollars of congressionally approved foreign aid, a major win for the White House and executive authority and, according to critics, a body blow to the bedrock constitutional principle of congressional power of the purse.

At issue in Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition is $4 billion in foreign aid allocated by Congress that the Trump administration determined was wasteful, including funding for international public health such as HIV prevention programs, which have been credited with saving millions of lives.

The high court's right-wing majority found that "the asserted harms to the executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm" to aid recipients, while cautioning that "this order should not be read as a final determination on the merits."

The Trump administration sought not only validation of its claimed ability to claw back spending previously approved by Congress—which under the Constitution generally holds power of the purse—but also of "pocket recission," a highly contentious budgetary maneuver to cancel previously approved federal expenditures by exploiting legal ambiguity in the Impoundment Control Act (ICA).

Democrats and many legal experts contend that pocket recissions are illegal, and Democratic lawmakers warned even before Trump's White House return that he would try to use the tactic in order to refuse to disburse funds allocated by Congress for social programs.

Justice Elena Kagan—who dissented along with fellow liberals Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—asserted that the majority approved "essentially a presidential usurpation of Congress' power of the purse."

"The stakes are high: At issue is the allocation of power between the executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies," Kagan said.

“That is just the price of living under a Constitution that gives Congress the power to make spending decisions through the enactment of appropriations laws,” she wrote. “If those laws require obligation of the money, and if Congress has not by rescission or other action relieved the executive of that duty, then the executive must comply.”

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court dealt a temporary blow to Trump's evisceration of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in a ruling that left intact a lower court's decision ordering the resumption of approximately $2 billion in foreign aid frozen by the administration.

Friday's ruling could complicate bipartisan negotiations to avert a Republican government shutdown as the September 30 deadline looms. Democratic negotiators now worry that Trump, buoyed by the high court decision, could again refuse to spend funds designated by Congress.

“Today’s ruling allows the administration to unilaterally refuse to spend $4 billion in foreign assistance funds that it is required by law to spend," said Nicolas Sansone, an attorney at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and counsel for the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition. "This result further erodes separation of powers principles that are fundamental to our constitutional order. It will also have a grave humanitarian impact.”