.

Attorneys for the Trump administration filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night, asking justices to allow it to block billions of dollars in foreign aid spending Congress had already appropriated. The legal filing now returns the issue of U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) spending to the high court for the second time in six months.

The Trump administration is contesting nearly $12 billion in aid the president has set aside for USAID, funds that are statutorily required to be disbursed before the current fiscal year ends on September 30. After returning to the White House in January, Trump acted swiftly, signing an executive order on his first day back in office, instructing the federal government to stop disbursing almost all foreign aid. The president said the move was part of a larger effort to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse” in overseas spending.

The order was quickly met with resistance in federal court, where in February, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali of Washington, D.C., issued an injunction against the administration’s plans. Ali ordered the White House to continue releasing the funds for projects that Congress had already signed off on. The judge also said the Trump administration would have to resume payments on billions of dollars in USAID grants.

The Trump administration has pushed back on the decision. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit revisited the case, voting 2-1 to overturn Ali’s injunction. In her opinion for the majority, Judge Karen L. Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, said the plaintiffs in the case — a coalition of foreign aid groups that wants its grant payments restored — had failed to show that they had a proper cause of action against the administration. Henderson wrote that the groups lacked standing under a legal doctrine known as the “impoundment control act.”

Although the appeals court’s ruling was a win for the Trump administration, the court has yet to issue a formal mandate enforcing that ruling. That has left Ali’s prior order — and the payment schedule he set out — technically still in place. As a result, the administration is now in a mad dash to prevent itself from being forced to disburse the full $12 billion by the end of September, when the current fiscal year is set to expire.

Arguments

Sauer, who filed the emergency petition with the Supreme Court on Tuesday, wrote in his filing that unless the justices take up the case, the government will be “forced to rapidly obligate some $12 billion in foreign-aid funds” by the September 30 deadline. He further argued that the dispute should not be worked out by the federal court system, but instead by the political branches of the government.

“Congress did not upset the delicate interbranch balance by allowing for unlimited, unconstrained private suits,” Sauer wrote in the filing. He continued that “any lingering dispute about the proper disposition of funds that the President seeks to rescind shortly before they expire should be left to the political branches, not effectively prejudged by the district court.”

The plaintiffs in the case, a coalition of foreign aid groups whose work depends on USAID grants, say just the opposite. The groups say the president does not have the power to unilaterally block the money, once Congress has already appropriated it. Their claim largely rests on two statutes, the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), a law enacted in the 1970s to curtail executive overreach in federal spending, and the Administrative Procedure Act.

That fight has raised the question of how much leeway a president has to unilaterally cancel or delay spending Congress has already set aside. The legal dispute over USAID spending for the Trump administration is only one in a series of similar cases. The Supreme Court has already weighed in once this year, issuing a narrow 5-4 decision in the dispute earlier this year. Now, with billions of dollars in foreign aid spending on the line, and the end of the fiscal year fast approaching, the justices are once again being asked to weigh in.

For Trump, the legal battle over USAID funds is part of a larger push to change U.S. spending priorities and the way the federal government doles out foreign assistance programs. For the aid groups challenging his executive order, the outcome of the case is existential: if the plaintiffs lose, the projects they have already started around the globe may have to be scaled back or shut down altogether.

With the appeals court ruling in partial limbo and the Trump administration now asking for immediate relief from the Supreme Court, the high court’s decision on the emergency appeal could determine not just the fate of $12 billion in foreign aid spending, but set a precedent for the limits of presidential power in the administration of congressionally-appropriated funds.