The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected 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.
The court’s brief order was unsigned, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. It said only that the trial judge, who had ordered the government to resume payments, “should clarify what obligations the government must fulfill.”
But the ruling represented 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. The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal members to form a majority.
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.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the four dissenting justices, said the majority had gone profoundly astray.
“Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the government of the United States to pay out (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.”
The order was released first thing in the morning, which is not typical when the court acts on emergency applications. The majority may have wished to avoid releasing the order thwarting Mr. Trump hours before he delivered his first address to the Congress since taking office in January.
The order was a single paragraph, most of it devoted to a recitation of the complicated procedural history of the case. It noted that the deadline for complying with the lower court’s order requiring the disbursement of the funds had passed and that litigation would continue to make its way through the courts. For now, it concluded only that the lower court should clarify its previous order with “due regard for the feasibility of any compliance timelines.”
The reference to the passing deadline could be read to mean that the government has no immediate obligations until the trial judge takes further action. The instructions to the judge to clarify what the government must do, taking account of feasibility, suggested the case may well return to the Supreme Court.
But Justice Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh saw the temporary action as far more significant.
“The government,” Justice Alito wrote in a slashing eight-page dissent, “must apparently pay the $2 billion posthaste — not because the law requires it, but simply because a district judge so ordered. 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.”
The administration halted the aid on Jan. 20, Mr. Trump’s first day in office. His executive order temporarily ended thousands of programs around the world to assess whether they were “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the president of the United States.”
Recipients and other nonprofit groups filed two lawsuits challenging the freeze as an unconstitutional exercise of presidential power that thwarted congressional appropriations for the U.S. Agency for International Development.
The groups said the frozen funds have created cascading crises, threatening critical medical care around the world, leaving food rotting in warehouses, ruining businesses and risking the spread of diseases and political instability.
“One cannot overstate the impact of that unlawful course of conduct: on businesses large and small forced to shut down their programs and let employees go; on hungry children across the globe who will go without; on populations around the world facing deadly disease; and on our constitutional order,” lawyers for Global Health Council, a membership organization of health groups, wrote in one of the suits.
Judge Amir Ali of the Federal District Court in Washington, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden, issued a temporary restraining order on Feb. 13 prohibiting administration officials from ending or pausing payments of appropriated money under contracts that were in place before Mr. Trump took office.
He said the administration had offered no explanation for the blanket suspension of aid Congress had directed be paid.
But administration officials seemed to evade if not defy that order, saying they were entitled to continue to conduct case-by-case review of the grants and contracts and halt or approve spending one at a time.
The plaintiffs repeatedly returned to court, asking Judge Ali to enforce his order. On Feb. 25, he ordered the officials to pay more than $1.5 billion in already completed aid work. He set a deadline for midnight the next day.
Just hours before the deadline, the Trump administration filed in an emergency application to the Supreme Court arguing the judge had overstepped his authority.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., acting on his own, promptly issued an “administrative stay” temporarily blocking the orders. Such stays are interim measures meant to give the justices some breathing room while the full court considered the matter. Wednesday’s order lifted the stay.
In a brief filed on Friday, the challengers wrote that the administration was wrong at every step of its legal analysis.
“The government comes to this court with an emergency of its own making,” the brief said, adding: “By forcing thousands of American businesses and nonprofits to suspend their work, and by halting disbursements for work that they had already performed, even work that already had been reviewed by the government and cleared for payment, the government plunged respondents into financial turmoil.”
Justice Alito, in his dissent, said the administration should not be thwarted by a single judge.
“Today,” he wrote, “the court makes a most unfortunate misstep that rewards an act of judicial hubris and imposes a $2 billion penalty on American taxpayers.”
