Justices Reject Trump's Freeze on Foreign Aid

5-4 Emergency Ruling: Roberts and Barrett Join Skepticism of Plans to Reshape U.S.

Author

Matt Davis
March 06, 2025

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Today’s lead story in the New York Times is about the Supreme Court on Wednesday rejecting President Trump’s emergency request to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid in a “closely divided decision indicating that the justices will subject his efforts to reshape the government to close scrutiny.”

Of course the big news on social media is that we’re focusing on a powerful woman’s facial expression but in this case I’d say Amy Coney Barrett mighta known this would be picked up. Click through and watch the video if you haven’t seen it. She looks like she feels Donald Trump is the sort of man who might get found liable for sexual abuse in the changing rooms at Bergdorf Goodman (checks notes), okay, TWICE.

The order “represents one of the court’s first moves in response to the flurry of litigation filed in response to Mr. Trump’s efforts to slash government spending and take complete control of the executive branch,” Adam Liptak reports. The court moves slowly, even on “emergency orders” like this one, and you may remember I wrote about the flurry of litigation here on February 10. In the meantime quite a lot of bad stuff has happened, and moving at that pace is certainly part of the plan.

“Although the language of the order was mild, tentative and not a little confusing, its bottom line was that a bare majority of the court ruled against Mr. Trump on one of his signature projects. The president’s plans to remake American government, the order indicated, will have to face a court more skeptical than its composition, with six Republican appointees, might suggest.

That, in turn, is likely to give rise to major rulings testing, and perhaps recalibrating, the separation of powers required by the Constitution.”

One of the conservative justices on the court, Justice Samuel Alito — the guy who blamed his wife for flying a couple of pretty conservative flags outside his house last May — wrote a “slashing eight-page dissent.”

“Does a single district court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay our (and probably lose forever) two billion taxpayer dollars?” he asked. “The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”

For context: $2 billion is, at today’s calculation, a 175th of Elon Musk’s net worth. It sounds like Justice Alito, joined by Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh. These are not exactly renowned as dudes you would want to have round for dinner, incidentally. Unless it was to show them your signed copy of Mein Kampf during hors d’oeuvres. Still, it sounds like somebody moved their cheese.

“As the nation’s highest court, we have a duty to ensure that the power entrusted to federal judges by the Constitution is not abused. Today, the court fails to carry out that responsibility.”

Speaking of the Constitution with a capital C, the ruling appears to uphold the views of nonprofits and aid recipients that the freeze was “an unconstitutional exercise of presidential power that thwarted congressional appropriations for the U.S. Agency for International Development.”

The judge in question who ruled in favor of the nonprofits, Judge Amir Ali of the Federal District Court in Washington, was appointed by President Joe Biden. He issued a restraining order on Feb. 13 “prohibiting administration officials from ending or pausing payments of appopriated money under contracts that were in place before Mr. Trump took office.”

Again, that all sounds rather constitutional to me. It’s evidently more a question of politics at the Supreme Court level. Here’s one take on things which I must say seems fairly accurate.

If you’d like to read about the ten worst Supreme Court rulings since a conservative majority took over in 2020, you could do so here, but suffice to say, even I won’t be reading all of those so that you don’t have to.

Thanks for reading this newsletter and for talking about the news with your friends and family. I appreciate you.

Matt Davis lives with his wife and kid in Manhattan.