On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing an immediate pause in all United States foreign development assistance. Agency officials suspended all congressionally appropriated foreign aid, freezing billions of dollars in federal funding. The spending pause has forced lifesaving medical programs to shut down, planned distribution of vital medications to be canceled, refugee support programs to close their doors, shelters to turn children away, and more. A group of nonprofits that perform foreign assistance work with federal grant money challenged the suspension of funding in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.

In February 2025, CAC filed an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs’ motions for a preliminary injunction. Our brief made three principal points.

First, the Framers gave Congress control of appropriations and spending to guard against the risk of a tyrannical president. They took pains to deny the President the sweeping powers that the King of England had historically enjoyed, such as the power to spend without Parliament’s approval. By the time of the Constitutional Convention, there was a clear consensus that the legislative branch would have the power of the purse. In the Taxing and Spending Clause, the Framers granted Congress the affirmative power to raise revenue and to spend funds, while the Appropriations Clause limits the executive, stating that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” The text of the Constitution is clear that the executive branch cannot make an end-run around the legislative process, including in the realm of spending and appropriations.

Second, for hundreds of years, Congress has passed federal legislation guarding its control of the purse strings. Since the earliest days of the Republic, when the Tenth Congress passed the Purpose Statue requiring appropriations to be “solely applied to the objects for which they are respectively appropriated,” Congress has made clear that the President cannot disobey its spending decisions. The Anti-Deficiency Act reiterates that the executive branch cannot make spending decisions outside of what is authorized by law. Most significantly, after President Richard Nixon unlawfully refused to spend billions of dollars in federal appropriations, the 1974 Impoundment Control Act (ICA) was passed to rein in the President, creating special procedures the President must follow to seek congressional approval for delays or cancellations of federal funding. Recently, in response to the first Trump administration’s efforts to withhold foreign aid, Congress strengthened the ICA with new transparency requirements.

Third, centuries of practice and precedent confirm that the President and his subordinates have no authority to defy the will of Congress by refusing to execute laws requiring the disbursement of federal funding. In the 1838 decision Kendall v. United States ex rel. Stokes, the Supreme Court held that the executive branch had no inherent constitutional authority to rescind appropriated funds—a point the Court reiterated 150 years later in Train v. City of New York, rejecting President Nixon’s effort to rescind environmental protection funding. Lower courts across the country have similarly rejected presidential efforts to pause or cancel federal funding in defiance of Congress, as have high-ranking and respected executive branch attorneys, including some who went on to become Supreme Court justices.

In short, our brief argued that the district court should preliminarily block President Trump’s unlawful attempt to usurp Congress’s role in appropriations and spending.

In March 2025, the district court granted a preliminary injunction. Echoing our brief, the court explained that the Constitution’s text and history make clear that “constitutional power over whether to spend foreign aid is not the President’s own—and it is Congress’s own.” The court also observed that President Trump’s actions represent “an unbridled view of Executive power that the Supreme Court has consistently rejected” and, accordingly, ordered the Trump administration not to withhold congressionally appropriated foreign aid.

In June 2025, CAC filed an amicus brief in the D.C. Circuit, urging affirmance of the district court’s preliminary injunction. In addition to reiterating the points we made in the district court, our brief also explained that neither the Impoundment Control Act nor the President’s foreign affairs powers authorize him to defy the will of Congress by refusing to execute duly enacted appropriations laws.

On August 13, 2025, a D.C. Circuit panel vacated the district court’s preliminary injunction, concluding that under the Supreme Court’s decision in Dalton v. Specter the plaintiffs lacked a cause of action to pursue their constitutional claim challenging the executive branch’s refusal to spend funds that Congress appropriated. The panel also held that the plaintiffs could not enforce the ICA through the Administrative Procedure Act—only the Comptroller General may sue for violations of the ICA.

Judge Pan dissented, asserting that the majority’s decision “turns a blind eye to the ‘serious implications’ of this case for the rule of law and the very structure of our government.” Judge Pan added that the majority’s ruling “depart[s] from the norms of impartial appellate review” and, instead, “announce[s] a new and sweeping constitutional rule in the President’s favor.” As a result, the majority failed in its “responsibility to check the President when he violates the law and exceeds his constitutional authority,” according to Judge Pan.

The plaintiffs filed a petition for rehearing en banc, and on August 18, 2025, CAC filed another amicus brief urging the full D.C. Circuit to grant en banc review. This time, our brief focused on the panel’s Dalton holding, and made two main points.

First, we explained that the panel misread Dalton’s holding that “all executive actions in excess of statutory authority” are not “ipso facto unconstitutional” to mean that no executive action in excess of statutory authority is ever unconstitutional. Yet Dalton makes clear that plaintiffs may bring constitutional claims whenever the President violates the Constitution—to use Dalton’s language, in such cases there is “a want of [Presidential] power,” as opposed to “a mere excess or abuse of discretion in exerting a power given.” Indeed, the plaintiffs in Dalton failed because the statute at issue did not limit the President’s discretion at all.

Second, we explained that the Plaintiffs’ separation-of-powers claim in this case is wholly different than the claim in Dalton. The Plaintiffs alleged that Defendants refused to execute a mandatory appropriations statute, seizing for themselves Congress’s power of the purse with the goal of negating congressional policies, and making  this case like Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952), the archetypal separation-of-powers case.

On August 28, 2025, the D.C. Circuit denied en banc review, but critically, the panel amended its decision to make clear that although Plaintiffs could not pursue their constitutional claims or claims premised on the ICA, they could still pursue their claims under the Administrative Procedure Act for violations of the relevant appropriations statutes.

Judge Pan again dissented from the denial of rehearing en banc. Echoing our brief, she declared that the “Dalton Court would have been astonished at the panel’s application of that case to preclude the grantees’ separation-of-powers claim.” She deemed the panel’s Dalton holding “flawed and inconsistent with binding precedents,” and would have granted en banc review to correct it.