The $2 Billion Bungle: Trump’s Legal Team Falls Short

On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court handed down a very brief order that effectively requires the government to pay foreign aid contractors as much as $2 billion for work they’ve already completed. The Court’s order is quite narrow and is unlikely to have many implications for future cases.

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office for a second time, his administration attempted to halt funding for the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Wednesday’s Supreme Court order is the latest chapter in ongoing litigation over whether cutting off this funding is legal. In that order, the Supreme Court leaves in place a lower court decision which forbade the administration from “suspending, pausing, or otherwise preventing the obligation or disbursement of appropriated foreign-assistance funds” that had been authorized as of January 19.

So this is a defeat for Trump, but it is an extremely small one. The Supreme Court’s order is only one paragraph long, and it mostly says that the Court will not second-guess the lower court because of an amateurish mistake by acting solicitor general Sarah Harris and the other Justice Department lawyers working on this case.

The Supreme Court also decided this case, known as Department of State v. AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, in a 5-4 vote — with Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joining a dissenting opinion by Justice Samuel Alito. That means that, despite Harris’s error, four justices nonetheless sided with Trump.

Trump’s legal team flubbed this case by appealing the wrong lower court order
On February 13, federal District Judge Amir Ali issued a temporary order suggesting that the Trump administration’s suspension of USAID funding was illegally arbitrary because the administration has not “offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid…was a rational precursor to reviewing programs” for inefficiency or noncompliance with Trump’s policy goals.