The U.S. Supreme Court temporarily delayed a court-mandated deadline requiring the Trump administration to pay nearly $2 billion to contracted aid organizations for work they already completed.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in an order Wednesday night, stayed a lower court order that the administration pay out $1.9 billion by midnight. In his order, Roberts asked the aid groups that sued the Trump administration to provide a response by noon Friday after which the court will decide its next steps.
Roberts' order came after the Trump administration sought emergency intervention by the high court after a panel of federal appeals court judges denied the administration's earlier request to push the deadline.
Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris asked the justices to impose an administrative stay -- freezing the status quo for a short time.
"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 wrote in the emergency request, saying the deadline created "an untenable payment plan" at odds with the president's obligations.
"The order appears to contemplate the immediate outlay of nearly $2 billion. And the government has no sure mechanism to recover wrongfully disbursed funds delivered to entities that claim to be near insolvency," Harris said in the request.
In proceedings earlier Wednesday denying a request to stay his deadline, U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali, a Biden-era appointee, balked at the government's insistence that it couldn't meet the midnight payout deadline and criticized the Trump administration for waiting until Tuesday to raise the argument that they lack the ability to restart the funding.
"This is not something that Defendants have previously raised in this Court, whether at the hearing or any time before filing their notice of appeal and seeking a stay pending appeal. That is so even though Plaintiffs' motion to enforce explicitly proposed compliance on this time frame," Ali wrote.