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.