Politics
Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to Freeze Foreign Aid
The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected President Trump’s emergency request to freeze nearly $2 billion in foreign aid as part of his efforts to slash government spending.
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 is one of the court’s first moves in response to the flurry of litigation filed in response to President Trump’s efforts to dramatically reshape government. 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.
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) $2 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 administration halted the aid on Jan. 20, President Trump’s first day in office. 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. In a ruling 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.
Justice Alito wrote that the court should not allow the lower court judge’s order to remain in place.
“The government 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.”
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.”
The brief added that the administration had challenged only Judge Ali’s order requiring the money to be disbursed and not his original order preventing the funding freeze. Even if the government won, the brief said, the administration would not be able to proceed with the funding freeze.
In an executive order on Jan. 20, Mr. Trump temporarily halted thousands of programs around the globe to assess whether they are “fully aligned with the foreign policy of the President of the United States.”
“The United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and in many cases antithetical to American values,” the order said. “They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.”
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Gilad Thaler, Jon Miller, Stephanie Swart, Rafaela Balster, Whitney Shefte and Nikolay Nikolov
May 29, 2026
Politics
Federal judge orders Trump’s name removed from Kennedy Center, says only Congress can rename it
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A federal judge on Friday ordered that President Donald Trump’s name be removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, said the iconic venue cannot be renamed without an act of Congress, ruling that the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees overstepped its “statutory bounds by unilaterally renaming” the building.
As part of his ruling, the Trump administration will be required to take down all physical signage bearing Trump’s name and eliminate any references to a “Trump-Kennedy Center” from official materials.
TRUMP KENNEDY CENTER’S BOARD VOTES UNANIMOUSLY TO APPROVE $257M RENOVATIONS AND TWO-YEAR CLOSURE
A sign is displayed on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts building. (Getty Images)
“The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear that the Center is to be named for President Kennedy, and it cannot bear any other formal name or public memorial based on the Board’s unilateral say-so,” Cooper wrote. “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”
Roma Daravi, the Trump Kennedy Center vice president of public relations, said the board plans to appeal the decision.
“We will review the decision carefully though the reality remains — the Center requires an urgent and significant restoration – a truth that even the plaintiff acknowledges,” Daravi said. “With $257 million secured by President Trump and approved by Congress, the resources are in place and we remain committed to pursuing every lawful avenue to ensure the Trump Kennedy Center is restored as a national cultural landmark for all Americans to enjoy.”
The ruling was part of a lawsuit filed by U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
BOARD VOTES KENNEDY CENTER TO BE RENAMED ‘TRUMP-KENNEDY CENTER,’ LEAVITT SAYS
President Donald Trump stands in the presidential box during a tour of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 2025. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s name must be removed from he iconic venue. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
Cooper previously denied a request for a preliminary injunction filed by a preservation group to block the planned two-year closure of the Kennedy Center for a rehabilitation project.
Trump secured $257 million from Congress as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to address disrepair and deferred maintenance of the Kennedy Center, which critics say has been neglected and mismanaged before Trump intervened.
The funds appropriated by Congress are spent on maintenance, repairs, security, and capital projects related to the building and site.
Beatty, who serves as an ex officio member of the board, praised Friday’s ruling.
“Today’s ruling rightly affirms that this administration’s efforts to rename and close the Center have no basis in law,” Beatty said in a statement provided to Fox News Digital. “The Kennedy Center is an institution that belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump. He has desecrated this sacred memorial for his own vanity. I am proud to have fought for the rule of law and to protect this sacred institution.”
Workers install Donald J. Trump signage above the existing Kennedy Center sign in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 19, 2025. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)
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Trump’s name was added to the venue last December following a unanimous decision by the board. In February 2025, Trump was elected chairman of the Kennedy Center board after removing 18 trustees appointed by former President Joe Biden.
WASHINGTON — A framework agreement to end the U.S. war with Iran is all but settled, pending sign-off from the presidents of the two warring sides, President Trump said Friday, projecting optimism that a deal could finally be at hand.
Yet doubt cast a shadow over the diplomatic process entering the weekend as Trump faced a politically fraught decision to enter an agreement that would invariably require significant concessions to Tehran.
The negotiations have faced severe headwinds in recent days, with both sides accusing the other of violating a fragile ceasefire that has largely stopped the fighting since April.
On his Truth Social site, Trump said he had summoned his top aides to the White House Situation Room to decide on the deal.
The agreement would see an end to the U.S. naval blockade on Iranian ports and the removal of Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz, an international waterway through which 20% of the world’s energy supply passes each day. The strait, Trump wrote, will reopen with “no tolls” for “unrestricted shipping traffic, in both directions.”
And “Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb,” Trump wrote, noting that Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for nuclear weapons, “will be unearthed by the United States (which, it is agreed, is the only Country, along with China, with the mechanical capability of doing so!), in close coordination and conjunction with the Islamic Republic of Iran, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, and DESTROYED.”
“No money will be exchanged, until further notice,” he added.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also said the deal would require Iran to disavow the continuation of its domestic nuclear program — a diplomatic feat never before achieved throughout a quarter-century of international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear work.
It is unclear whether Tehran would go that far. And Iran’s negotiators expressed defiance on Friday, stating that there was “no trust in guarantees or words” from the American side.
“No step will be taken before the other side acts first,” said Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s Parliament. “We do not gain concessions through dialogue, but through missiles.”
It remains unclear when the Trump administration would ease sanctions on Iran, how extensive that relief would be, or what form it would take — questions that fueled Republican criticism of the Obama-era nuclear deal more than a decade ago.
The working diplomatic document would formally extend the existing ceasefire for 60 days, allowing for a more detailed negotiation to take place over Iran’s nuclear program. But the truce as it currently stands is on perilous ground. Iran launched a ballistic missile on Thursday at Kuwait, a close U.S. ally, after American forces took “defensive” actions against Iranian missile launchers and mine-laying boats it had launched in the strait.
The war has proved historically unpopular with the American public, and has seen oil prices soar since the U.S. military, in partnership with Israel, launched its first strikes against Iran in February.
Bessent said he is hopeful that oil prices would drop quickly once an agreement is signed. But industry analysts say the effects of the war on the oil market could last for months, if not years, with the stability of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz now in question for commercial shippers.
While oil has dropped to under $100 a barrel, markets appeared skittish on Friday over the prospects for a deal, with mixed messages appearing to emerge out of the region.
It is also unclear whether a U.S. agreement with Iran would in any way bind Israel’s hands in its military operations, either in Iran or in Lebanon, where an Iranian proxy militia, Hezbollah, has vowed to keep up the fight.
Israel has ramped up strikes against Hezbollah targets in recent days, jeopardizing a delicate ceasefire negotiated with the Lebanese government, a deal encouraged by the Trump administration in order to grease the wheels for its talks with Tehran.
Trump has been uncharacteristically silent on the prospects of an agreement in recent days, expressing cautious optimism in limited exchanges with reporters.
“It’s hard to say exactly when or if the president’s going to sign,” Vice President JD Vance, who has led the U.S. diplomatic team, told reporters, noting that “the nuclear stuff” is still subject to negotiation. “We’re going back and forth on a couple of language points.”
“I do think that we’ve made a lot of progress here,” Vance added. “Hopefully we’ll continue to make progress, and the president will be in a position where he can endorse the agreement. But obviously, that’s still TBD.”
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