The US supreme court has handed Donald Trump a temporary victory by overturning a lower court’s decision demanding his administration immediately pay for $1.5bn in work already completed on behalf of the US Agency for International Development (USAid).
John Roberts, the chief justice, issued an “administrative stay” late on Wednesday, removing a midnight deadline on the Trump administration to release the funds. The money has been frozen since day one of Trump’s second term in the presidency, when he signed an executive order halting US spending abroad.
The supreme court order was made in response to an emergency appeal from the Trump administration protesting the deadline to release the funds. The decision is temporary, in effect buying the justices time to come to a more considered ruling.
But it represents the first victory for Trump awarded by the supreme court amid the welter of lawsuits that the president has provoked in his aggressive return to the Oval Office. There have so far been 94 legal challenges to the administration’s actions, according to the Just Security tracker.
USAid has been a major target for the Trump administration’s campaign to tear up long established government practices and fire thousands of federal employees. The president has argued that the agency, which was founded in 1961 by John F Kennedy and provides disaster and poverty relief as well as environmental protections around the world, is out of step with his “America first” objectives.
Trump and the tech billionaire Elon Musk have made false claims and aired conspiracy theories about rampant fraud and waste at the agency.
The supreme court’s action overturns the ruling of a federal judge, Amir Ali, who had ordered the Trump administration to keep funds flowing to thousands of USAid contractors and non-profit organisations. The contractors had complained that they were being deprived of compensation for work that had already been agreed on and carried out.
When the judge discovered that the funds were still largely frozen despite his order, he set the Wednesday midnight deadline that the supreme court then lifted.
Almost all of the 10,000 USAid employees have been placed on leave. Many have been given a 15-minute window on Thursday and Friday in which they are allowed to return to their workplaces to clear their desks.
