The Supreme Court on Wednesday night agreed to delay a midnight deadline for the Trump administration to unfreeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid payments.
The Justice Department filed the emergency application on Wednesday, stating that it would not be able to meet the deadline because it would take weeks to pay out the money, per CNN.
“The court’s 11:59 p.m. 30-some-hour deadline thus moved all the goalposts,” acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris wrote in the application. “It is not tailored to any actual payment deadlines associated with respondents’ invoices or drawn-down requests, or anyone else’s. And it has thrown what should be an orderly review by the government into chaos.”
The deadline was imposed by U.S. District Judge Amir Ali, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, after plaintiffs stated that the Trump administration was slow to act on his order to restore funding for USAID and State Department contracts from the Biden administration according to The Hill.
“What the government cannot do is pay arbitrarily determined demands on an arbitrary timeline of the district court’s choosing or according to extra-contractual rules that the court has devised,” Harris said.
“That mandate creates an untenable payment plan at odds with the president’s obligations.”