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In an emergency appeal on Tuesday night, lawyers for the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow it to block billions in foreign aid spending that had already been approved by Congress. The move returns the case over the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the high court for the second time in six months.

The roughly $12 billion at stake in the USAID fight is a pot of aid Congress set aside to fund the foreign development agency, but it must be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year on September 30. President Donald Trump acted quickly upon his return to office in January, issuing an executive order on his first day in office instructing the federal government to freeze nearly all foreign aid payments. The president said at the time he was cracking down on “waste, fraud, and abuse” in overseas expenditures.

That order was immediately challenged in court, and in February, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali in Washington, D.C., said the White House must continue to release the funds for projects Congress had already approved. The judge’s ruling forced the Trump administration to resume payments on billions in USAID grants.

The Trump administration has pushed back at every step of the way. This month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit took up the case once again, voting 2-1 to overturn Judge Ali’s injunction. In the majority opinion, Judge Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, wrote that the plaintiffs in the case — a group of foreign aid organizations seeking to restore their grant payments — lacked the proper “cause of action” to sue the administration, invoking a legal concept known as the doctrine of impoundment.

While the appeals court’s ruling was a major victory for Trump, the court has not yet issued a formal mandate allowing it to take effect. That gap has left Judge Ali’s earlier injunction — and the payment schedule he set for USAID funding — technically in effect. For the White House, that means the administration is working against the clock to avoid being forced to release the entire $12 billion by the end of September.

Arguments and high stakes

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who filed the emergency appeal with the Supreme Court on Tuesday, said that the government “faces a September 30 statutory deadline by which to ‘rapidly obligate’” some $12 billion in foreign-aid funds. The dispute over USAID spending “implicates weighty institutional concerns that are not well served by federal-court resolution,” he added.

“Congress did not upset the delicate interbranch balance by allowing for unlimited, unconstrained private suits,” Sauer wrote in the filing. “Any lingering dispute about the proper disposition of funds that the President seeks to rescind shortly before they expire should be left to the political branches, not effectively prejudged by the district court.”

The plaintiffs in the case — a group of foreign aid organizations that depend on USAID money for their work — have taken the opposite view. They argue the president can not block money Congress has already appropriated, a central tenet of the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), a law passed in the 1970s to prevent executive branch overreach over federal spending. The plaintiffs also cite the Administrative Procedure Act as a key element of their statutory claim.

It’s a clash over money and executive authority that raises broader questions about the balance of power between the White House and Congress. If the Trump administration wins, it would affirm a president’s power to rescind or delay spending Congress has already set aside. If the plaintiffs win, it would once again set limits on the executive’s discretion over the budget.

The Supreme Court previously heard the case over a similar dispute and issued a narrow 5-4 ruling earlier this year. With the fiscal deadline looming and billions of dollars in foreign aid grants at stake, the justices have again been called upon to wade into the heated dispute.

For the president, the case is another piece of a broad effort to overhaul U.S. spending priorities and consolidate control over foreign aid programs. For aid groups, the risk is existential: without the funding, projects already underway could be curtailed or closed altogether.

With the appeals court ruling in partial limbo and the administration desperate for relief before the end of September, the Supreme Court’s approach to this latest emergency appeal may ultimately decide the fate of not only $12 billion in foreign aid but the scope of presidential power over congressionally appropriated funds.