When Congress appropriates money there is inherently a latitude allowed the President who is obligated to "faithfully" execute the law. In 1974 Congress, post Watergate, encted the Impoundment Control Act which constrained the President's discretion regarding appropriated funds. We are now faced with a newly elected President who believes that his personal presidential priorities are the governing force.
But today the Supreme Court - over dissent by the Democratic appointees - allowed Trump's refusal to spend appropriated foreign aid funds that will expire in days if not committed. Although the order asserted that the decision is preliminary the expiry of the appropriated funds effectively renders the decision final.
The unsigned opinion of the Republican-appointed majority explains
The Government has also made a sufficient showing that mandamus relief is unavailable to respondents [Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, et al.]. And, on the record before the Court, the asserted harms to the Executive’s conduct of foreign affairs appear to outweigh the potential harm faced by respondents.
But who are the respondents and what are their interests? The Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition wants to implement Congress's mandate to protect not their own but the health of millions across the globe. Yet President Trump, immediately upon taking office froze all such spending by Executive Order. It falls therefore to the Courts to resolve this interbranch conflict. [See Exec. Order No. 14169, 90 Fed. Reg. 8619 (2025)]
Justice Kagan, writing for the thre dissenters, first laments that this decision of enormous import is being made on the thin record of the Court's emergency docket . She explains in a concise way the fundamental issue at stake:
The ICA [1974 Impoundment Control Act] emerged against the backdrop of President Nixon’s large-scale efforts to impound appropriated funds, and thus to substitute his own policy priorities for Congress’s.
Presidential defiance of Congressional objectives is the kind of monarchic behaviour that the Constitution was designed to prevent. AS Alexander Hamilton observed in Federalist #74 "Of all the cares or concerns of government, the direction of war most peculiarly demands those qualities which distinguish the exercise of power by a single hand". But the needs of the Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition do not implicate or infringe the powers of the President as Commander in Chief of the armed forces.
Justice Kagan,, a master of the declaratory sentence explains at some length:
This emergency application raises novel issues fundamental to the relationship between the President and Congress. It arises from the refusal of the President and his officers to obligate and spend billions of dollars that Congress appropriated for foreign aid. Prospective beneficiaries of those funds challenged the decision to withhold them as an unlawful impoundment—essentially, a Presidential usurpation of Congress’s power of the purse. ***
The Executive’s argument about irreparable harm and the balance of equities fares no better. The Executive says that to comply with the District Court’s order to obligate the $4 billion, it will have to “enter into negotiations” with “foreign states or international organizations.” .... And in those discussions, the Executive protests, it will have to “advocate against its own objectives”—“undermin[ing]” its real view that the expenditures are “contrary to U. S. foreign policy.” .... But 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. 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. [emph added]
- GWC
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