The Supreme Court just handed Donald Trump something no president should have — the power to ignore Congress’s decisions on federal spending. In a 6-3 decision issued Friday, the Court froze nearly $5 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, siding with Trump’s claim that the executive branch can block funding if it clashes with the president’s foreign policy priorities.
The unsigned order is a massive signal of where things are headed — and it’s a huge win for Trump. The majority reasoned that “the asserted harms to the Executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm faced by respondents.” That was enough to let the freeze stand.
The case centers around about $4.9 billion in foreign aid approved by Congress through USAID, plus several million earmarked for HIV and AIDS programs. Back in January, Trump signed an executive order saying that no foreign assistance should be spent unless it “fully aligned” with his administration’s foreign policy goals. Within weeks, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that all State Department-managed aid would be halted.
That sudden freeze affected a long list of nonprofit and humanitarian groups that rely on those funds to operate — many of whom had already completed work for the U.S. government and were owed money. Organizations like the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and the Journalism Development Network sued. And in a short-term win, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled the government had to pay what it owed.
But Trump appealed — first to the D.C. Circuit, and eventually to the Supreme Court.
Back in March, Judge Ali ruled again that Trump’s freeze was likely illegal, writing that while the president had “significant discretion” over how the money was spent, he had “no discretion” over whether it was spent. That decision echoed a core constitutional principle: Congress controls the purse, not the president.
But Trump wasn’t done.
On August 28, just over a month before the fiscal year deadline, Trump notified Speaker Mike Johnson that he was issuing a pocket rescission — essentially a pocket veto — to cancel the spending unless Congress acted to override it. Pocket vetoes are rare and legally murky, but under the Impound Control Act of 1974, they do require Congress to respond within 45 days. With the clock ticking and litigation ongoing, the timing of Trump’s move gave him the upper hand.
In September, Judge Ali tried once again to push back, saying the freeze violated the law and ordering the administration to release the funds. Trump appealed again. And this time, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court sided with him — freezing the money and giving Trump exactly what he wanted: time.
Time to run out the clock. Time to let the funds expire. And time to make Congress’s will irrelevant.
Kagan: “The Stakes Are High”
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, issued a blistering dissent.
“At issue is the allocation of power between the Executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies,” she wrote. “The stakes are high.”
She criticized the majority for deciding such a weighty constitutional question through the Court’s emergency docket — with no oral arguments, no lower court opinion to rely on, and virtually no time to deliberate. “In a few weeks’ time… we will decide cases of far less import with far more process and reflection,” Kagan noted.
And then she got to the core problem: The Supreme Court just gave the executive branch power to defy Congress without consequence.
“If the law requires funds to be spent and Congress hasn’t rescinded the cash, then the executive branch must comply,” Kagan wrote. Trump’s argument — that spending the funds would force him into uncomfortable diplomatic conversations — doesn’t change that.
“That is just the price of living under a Constitution that gives Congress the power to make spending decisions,” she added.
Kagan reminded the Court — and the country — that this isn’t the first time a president has tried to pull something like this. President Richard Nixon famously attempted to ignore appropriations laws and withhold money Congress had approved. The backlash was swift and bipartisan, and it led directly to the passage of the Impound Control Act in 1974.
“There was a fierce congressional reaction,” Kagan wrote, when Nixon tried to “substitute his own policy priorities for Congress’s.”
But this time, there’s no backlash. Just silence — or worse, acquiescence.
A Dangerous New Precedent
Friday’s order isn’t just about $5 billion in aid. It’s about whether presidents can now act as a one-man veto over Congress’s budget decisions — even after the legislative process has played out, and the money has been legally approved.
And with this ruling, the Supreme Court has cracked that door wide open.
It’s the kind of shift that doesn’t always make headlines the way criminal trials or campaign rallies do. But legal experts and constitutional scholars are watching closely — and warning that the implications could be massive.
Because if the president can simply ignore Congress and hold funding hostage until time runs out, then the power of the purse doesn’t belong to Congress anymore. It belongs to the White House.
