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.”
new video loaded: Reflecting Pool Turns Green, Paint Peels After Renovation
transcript
transcript
Reflecting Pool Turns Green, Paint Peels After Renovation
Algae blooms have hit the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which underwent a $14.2 million repair project. Blue paint appeared to be chipping from the bottom.
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“The reflecting pool is greener than I have ever seen it before due to algae.” “I was expecting to see blue, but green is O.K.” “Honestly, I don’t think you can fight mother nature.”
By Julie Yoon, Jackeline Luna and Alisa Shodiyev Kaff
June 19, 2026
NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!
House GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., rebuked a school board in Richmond, Michigan, after some of its members tried to remove a conservative colleague for missing meetings while on military deployment to the Middle East.
Ray Stier, who received an American flag and a copy of the Congressional Record from McClain on Thursday as a commendation of his work, had been on deployment, attending board meetings remotely, but eventually lost virtual access.
That’s when the board called for his removal, citing a “disservice” caused by his absence.
“One of the board members’ family was taking to social media and putting out misinformation about myself and my wife and things that were not factually accurate and then ultimately calling for my resignation and prompting others to reach out to the district to call for my recall,” Stier recounted.
PARENTS SAY THEY’RE RUNNING FOR LOCAL SCHOOL BOARDS TO FIGHT ‘POISONOUS’ CRITICAL RACE THEORY
House GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., left, pictured alongside Ray Stier, a school board member in Richmond, Michigan. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images; office of Lisa McClain)
The moment is just the most recent clash between Republicans and school boards over policies that, in their view, are gatekeeping schools against diversity of thought and accountability.
“I think education is extremely important and vital,” McClain told Fox News Digital.
“And educators and administrators need to teach children how to think, not what to think. It’s about time that administrators begin to get held accountable for their actions. Good actions and bad actions.”
McClain’s meeting with Stier comes on the heels of a congressional hearing last week where she grilled a superintendent from Virginia over student privacy policy, probing if those policies were being unevenly applied to favor transgender students.
VIRGINIA SCHOOL DISTRICT SLAPPED WITH COMPLAINT ALLEGING NEW CLAIMS IN VIRAL TRANS LOCKER ROOM FIGHT
Rep. Lisa McClain, R-Mich., leaves a House Republican Conference meeting at the Capitol Hill Club on Feb. 28, 2023. (Tom Williams/ CQ Roll Call via Getty Images)
“The victims got a 10-day suspension and the biological female that did the filming got a one-day suspension,” McClain said, referring to an incident at Stone Bridge High School in Loudoun County where students had been reprimanded for filming in a locker room.
“How does that make sense?”
In Stier’s case, McClain questioned whether the board had targeted Stier on account of just his deployment overseas. Stierhad clashed with the board after learning that some of the district’s bathroom policies would have allowed fourth-grade students to use the same bathroom as transgender eighth-grade boys.
“Prior to him filling the seat, the seat was open for two months,” McClain observed. So that logical argument doesn’t exactly make sense to me; it doesn’t really hold a lot of water.”
MICHIGAN PARENT WANTS TRUMP TO ACT AFTER DAUGHTER SHARES LOCKER ROOM WITH TRANS-ATHLETE
House GOP Conference Chairwoman Lisa McClain, R-Mich., left, pictured alongside Richmond, Michigan school board member Ray Stier right. (Office of Lisa McClain)
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For his own part, Stier believes his case will refocus attention on the importance of the school board and its membership.
“My goal is to continue being an advocate for the community. One of the good things that I think came out of this was that it got so much attention that some of the community members who were unaware of the dynamics that were not being brought to light,” Stier said.
California’s political watchdog commission on Thursday finalized a $31,500 fine against Gov. Gavin Newsom, alleging that the Democratic leader failed to report three dozen behested payments totaling $5.5 million mostly to support wildfire recovery by the deadline under state law.
The Political Reform Act requires elected officials to disclose payments of $5,000 or more that they solicit or direct others to give to a charitable, legislative or governmental purpose within 30 days.
The California Fair Political Practices Commission said 34 of the violations were for failing to report on time that Newsom and his staff directed outreach from companies and foundations that wanted to help after the Los Angeles wildfires to the California Fire Foundation. The nonprofit was started in 1987 by the California Professional Firefighters to support the families of fallen firefighters and communities impacted by fire.
The donations include $1 million from the Chuck Lorre Foundation and $500,000 apiece from Lockheed Martin, the Anthem Blue Cross Foundation and BlackRock, among others gifts.
The governor also failed in 2024 to report on time two behested payments, totaling $100,000 from the Schmidt Family Foundation and Schwab Charitable Funds to the Institute for Local Government, a nonprofit within the League of California Cities.
The commission said the governor reported all of the payments “prior to public discovery” or contact from its enforcement division, which it considered a mitigating factor. Newsom also signed the stipulation and agreed to the fine.
Tara Gallegos, a spokesperson for Newsom’s office, said the issue involved late paperwork at a time when the governor’s staff was focused on emergency response and supporting survivors. She also underscored the fact that the reports were filed before he was contact by the FPPC.
Gallegos said the fine is unrelated to an alleged investigation into the governor and his wife by the Department of Justice, which Newsom announced this week.
Newsom alleged Monday that Trump is using the government as a political weapon to target him and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Newsom announced the investigation after he learned that the FBI and Internal Revenue Service asked his associates questions about nonprofits and businesses related to the couple.
The governor’s office characterized the investigation as a fishing expedition. The Trump administration declined to comment.
A source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly, said two federal probes have been going on for about a year, and that they originated not from Washington, D.C., but from conversations between whistleblowers and federal prosecutors based in Sacramento. The probes are linked to Newsom’s former chief-of-staff, Dana Williamson, and Siebel Newsom’s taxes, the source said.
The FPPC violations mark the second time Newsom has reported payments late, which increased his penalty for the new infractions. The commission fined Newsom in 2024 for failing to timely report 18 payments totaling $14.4 million.
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