Roberts steps in to protect Trump admin's effort to avoid court's USAID payment order

If the Trump administration was testing the Supreme Court with its last-minute filing on Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts gave them exactly what they wanted.

What did Chief Justice John Roberts do on Wednesday night?

Roberts put a February 25 district court order on hold that would have required the State Department and USAID to issue payments by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday that the government was obligated to pay under a February 13 temporary restraining order. Although styled as a “stay,” such orders from a single justice are often referred to as “administrative stays” — put in place while the full court can consider a request that comes to it on the shadow docket.

We don’t know the ultimate outcome in the case yet, but it did give the Trump administration what it wanted: not to issue the payments on Wednesday.

Given what has happened here, it is a particularly concerning sign about Roberts’s willingness to support the independence of federal courts. To explain, I want to take you through the timeline.

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On February 10, the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition and Journalism Development Network filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s foreign assistance executive order and the State Department, USAID, and Office of Management and Budget actions implementing it through blanket orders cutting off all funding. On February 11, the Global Health Council and other organizations and companies filed a similar lawsuit.

On February 13, Judge Amir Ali issued a temporary restraining order in both cases,

When the government filed its status report at the end of the day on February 18, however, a declaration from Pete Marocco, an official working in senior roles for both State and USAID, suggested — at least as to USAID — that the pause on payments was never lifted following the TRO because the pause was simply converted into a “case-by-case review.”

Additionally, the declaration laid out a claim of “robust statutory and constitutional authority” that included the ability of USAID to suspend or terminate “substantially all“ of USAID’s grants or contracts:

Those claims led the plaintiffs back to court, leading Ali on February 20 to grant their request to enforce the TRO, writing:

The government then asked for “clarification” of Ali’s order. On February 22, to the extent the government needed a clarification, Ali issued an order explaining what he had already told them:

On February 25, following a tense hearing after plaintiffs brought another motion to enforce the TRO, Ali — without limiting any of the original terms of the TRO — granted plaintiffs’ motion to enforce the TRO.

The government defendants were ordered to pay all of the relevant obligations as of the February 13 TRO by 11:59 p.m. February 26.

The government — for the first time in the cases — announced it was appealing. It was not appealing the February 13 TRO, though. It was solely appealing the February 25 order enforcing the February 13 TRO.

The government then in a series of increasingly bad-faith filings, asked Ali, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and — eventually — the Supreme Court to block Ali’s February 25 order.

The ultimate bad-faith argument was that, as DOJ lawyers told the D.C. Circuit, “the district court has ordered the federal government to pay nearly $2 billion in taxpayer dollars within 36 hours.“

Of course, nearly 300 hours passed between the issuance of the initial TRO on February 13 and the DC Circuit filing on February 26. Essentially, DOJ used its repeated unsuccessful efforts to limit Ali’s TRO to argue that his February 25 order was the first one that ordered that they pay their contracts.

Somehow, the filing by Acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris at the Supreme Court — filed before the D.C. Circuit even ruled on DOJ’s request there — was even more extreme. In her request, Harris insisted, “The court’s 11:59 p.m. 30-some-hour deadline … moved all the goalposts,” an attempt to erase the fact that Ali’s “goalposts” were only needed because the federal government — over the course of the first three orders — refused to issue payments.

The D.C. Circuit soon thereafter issued its decision dismissing DOJ’s appeal, stating succinctly and clearly that the federal government had no basis for appealing this order at this time on this basis.

The government defendants “have not shown that the district court’s February 25, 2025, minute orders, which enforced previously entered temporary restraining orders (“TROs”), had the effect of granting an injunction that is appealable,” the court’s order on behalf of Judges Cornelia Pillard, Florence Pan, and Brad Garcia — all Democratic appointees — held. “Appellants did not appeal the district court’s TROs. They now ask us to stay the orders enforcing the TROs. … Appellants cite no case that has held that such a later-issued supporting order is appealable.“

The appeals court also noted that the government defendants “have not shown that the enforcement orders disrupt the status quo by requiring them to do anything more than they would have had to do absent the temporarily restrained agency actions,” which is, of course, the action challenged.

And yet, a few hours later, Roberts let the Trump administration’s gambit work.

The chief justice of the United States allowed an ongoing and increasingly bad-faith effort to distort and sidestep a district court’s temporary restraining order to work. Roberts issued an order temporarily blocking Ali’s February 25 deadline-setting order beyond the time when the deadline set by that order would have passed.

While the Supreme Court might ultimately reject DOJ’s argument, allowing Ali to proceed with enforcing the TRO, the Trump administration’s effort to avoid court order compliance worked the first time in the new administration when Roberts was the last person standing between the administration and a deadline.

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Law Dork in the media

I joined Sam Seder on Wednesday on The Majority Report to talk Trump executive orders and challenges and more. (My part starts at 30:30 if it doesn’t launch from there.)

Check it out!