Fox News Watch TV Menu Recommended We must meet voters where they are, Dan Turrentine explains 06:34 We must meet voters where they are, Dan Turrentine explains Gov. Greg Abbott: Trump, Vance want to make sure even more is being done to secure the border

Fox News
Watch TV
Menu
Recommended
We must meet voters where they are, Dan Turrentine explains
06:34
We must meet voters where they are, Dan Turrentine explains
Gov. Greg Abbott: Trump, Vance want to make sure even more is being done to secure the border
03:32
Gov. Greg Abbott: Trump, Vance want to make sure even more is being done to secure the border
Secret Service director ‘confident’ they’ll get to the bottom of failed assassination attempts against Trump
09:29
Secret Service director ‘confident’ they’ll get to the bottom of failed assassination attempts against Trump
Dana Loesch: The right has learned how to build a coalition
02:26
Dana Loesch: The right has learned how to build a coalition
‘The Five’ reacts to Democrats blasting DOGE
12:12
‘The Five’ reacts to Democrats blasting DOGE
Jesse Watters: Trump is ‘driving laps’ around the Democrats
12:51
Jesse Watters: Trump is ‘driving laps’ around the Democrats
Democrats can’t give away American money fast enough, Jason Chaffetz says
06:53
Democrats can’t give away American money fast enough, Jason Chaffetz says
Trump’s ‘no tax on tips’ is such a great idea that Kamala Harris said it a week later, Patrick Bet-David says
05:22
Trump’s ‘no tax on tips’ is such a great idea that Kamala Harris said it a week later, Patrick Bet-David says
Trump is telling the Middle East he wants to be transparent with the Palestinian people, Steve Witkoff says
04:19
Trump is telling the Middle East he wants to be transparent with the Palestinian people, Steve Witkoff says
Democrats can’t ‘un-crazy themselves,’ Dana Loesch says
04:22
Democrats can’t ‘un-crazy themselves,’ Dana Loesch says
Pam Bondi confirmed as US attorney general
03:17
Pam Bondi confirmed as US attorney general
Trump ‘border czar’ Tom Homan: We have a great team and ‘will not fail this president’
06:08
Trump ‘border czar’ Tom Homan: We have a great team and ‘will not fail this president’
Laura: It’s critical DOGE scour every inch of our government
09:17
Laura: It’s critical DOGE scour every inch of our government
Laura: Democrats never let facts get in the way of a good smear operation
06:12
Laura: Democrats never let facts get in the way of a good smear operation
What is the evidence for the COVID lab leak theory?
03:52
What is the evidence for the COVID lab leak theory?
Jesse Watters: This would send Democrats back in time
08:24
Jesse Watters: This would send Democrats back in time
Jesse Watters: Trump isn’t whispering and tiptoeing around DC
13:26
Jesse Watters: Trump isn’t whispering and tiptoeing around DC
Chris Hansen reveals how he catches illegal migrants
03:33
Chris Hansen reveals how he catches illegal migrants
‘That’s Massachusetts for you!’: ICE arrests illegal migrants in Boston
04:44
‘That’s Massachusetts for you!’: ICE arrests illegal migrants in Boston
Biden called out for ‘criminal-first, victim-last mindset’
03:32
Biden called out for ‘criminal-first, victim-last mindset’
Opinion
Supreme Court’s USAID move has a surprise benefit for Trump
The Supreme Court’s decision to allow a trial judge’s order resuming spending to proceed is merely the first procedural skirmish in a larger constitutional battle
John Yoo By John Yoo Fox News
Published March 8, 2025 8:00am EST
Facebook
Twitter
Flipboard
Comments
Email
Conservative justices ‘stunned’ by Supreme Court’s USAID decisionVideo
Conservative justices ‘stunned’ by Supreme Court’s USAID decision
Fox News chief legal correspondent Shannon Bream unpacks the SCOTUS ruling on $2 billion in USAID payments on ‘Special Report.’

NEW
You can now listen to Fox News articles!
Opponents of President Donald Trump’s USAID spending freeze will take cheer from the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene this week. But there is less cause for celebration than they claim. The Justices’ decision to allow a trial judge’s order resuming spending to proceed is merely the first procedural skirmish in a larger constitutional battle that will return to the Court. In the meantime, Trump’s campaign to restore executive energy will still play out with the home field advantage created by the Constitution itself.

In Department of State v. Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, a D.C. federal trial judge issued an order forcing the administration to release about $2 billion to American-based humanitarian aid groups. Upon taking office, Trump ordered a 90-day freeze of foreign aid to determine that the grants remained effective and legitimate, properly disbursed, and in U.S. foreign policy and national security interests. Judge Amir Ali, just confirmed by the Senate to the D.C. federal district court in President Joe Biden’s lame duck period, took an extraordinary measure: he issued a temporary restraining order requiring payment at least for work allegedly already completed by the aid groups.

When the federal appeals court could not figure out whether to stop Judge Ali, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily put the order on hold last week. But this temporary halt proved exactly that – a 5-4 majority of the Court on Wednesday decided to allow Ali’s order to stand. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett unexpectedly joined Justice Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, but wrote no opinion, which is often the case in these procedural skirmishes.

SCOTUS RULES ON NEARLY $2B IN FROZEN USAID PAYMENTS

Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, issued a blistering dissent that argued that Judge Amir has no power to order the restraining order and, indeed, no authority to force the executive branch to spend the funds.

As he wrote: “Does a single district-court judge who likely lacks jurisdiction have the unchecked power to compel the Government of the United States to pay out (and probably lose forever) 2 billion taxpayer dollars? The answer to that question should be an emphatic ‘No,’ but a majority of this Court apparently thinks otherwise. I am stunned.”

Acting USAID head mulling criminal referrals over fraudVideo
Justice Alito’s dissent expertly skewers Judge Amir’s effort to shield his shenanigans from higher review and his clear abuse of power in ordering the executive branch to resume payments. The best defense for the votes of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett is that they want to see how the case plays out in the lower courts before choosing the right moment for Supreme Court intervention.

Eventually, however, the larger constitutional issue raised by the case will have to return to the Supreme Court. Trump is attempting to revive the president’s constitutional authority to refuse to spend funds in discrete categories. The first and most obvious is that Congress cannot order the president to use money unconstitutionally. Congress could not require the President to build bridges employing only white workers.

The second category at issue – on point with USAID – is that Congress cannot force presidents to spend funds that interfere with U.S. national security and foreign policy. The Constitution vests the nation’s leadership on those issues, as the courts have recognized, in the executive branch.

Congress cannot use its funding power to subvert the Constitution’s separation of powers; presidents have long refused to spend funds that do so. Thomas Jefferson, for example, refused to construct gunboats on the Mississippi River, as ordered by Congress, because they could have unnecessarily provoked Napoleon, with whom he was at that moment negotiating to purchase Louisiana. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower regularly refused to spend funds on unneeded weapons systems and military units.

US JUDGE ORDERS TRUMP ADMIN TO PAY PORTION OF $2B IN FOREIGN AID BY MONDAY

A third category is that presidents have some discretion to reduce spending for efficiency and effectiveness. The Constitution places on presidents alone the responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Executing this duty may give the president the ability to achieve Congress’s spending directives while also saving money and adapting to new circumstances. Suppose Congress appropriated $100 million to build a difficult set of dams, but because of engineering advances and favorable labor market conditions, the executive branch can complete the project for $50 million and return the savings to the Treasury.

To force presidents to waste money and maintain inferior government operations deprives the American people of the very virtues of having a president in the first place. The founders created the presidency so that a single man could act with “decision, activity, secrecy and dispatch,” as Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 70. Hamilton argued that the single president would bring “energy in the executive,” the very “definition of good government.” The new nation’s leaders had seen the failures wrought by committee government during the Revolutionary War and were eager to restore effective executive government.

Fired USAID employees leave the headquarters building in Washington, D.C.Video
In the wake of Watergate, Congress sought to end presidential ability to stop wasteful spending. In the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, Congress forbade presidents from fully spending all appropriations unless Congress approves. Congress rejected the decades of presidential practice from Jefferson through Nixon, nor did it recognize any exceptions for unconstitutional spending or interference with foreign policy and national security. While observers claim that a Supreme Court case, Train v. New York (1975), upheld the Act, it expressly did not. Train addressed a different law where Congress had ordered the EPA to spend specific amounts on water projects; the Court did not even mention the Impoundment Control Act. Although presidents from Ford through Biden have generally obeyed the Act, Congress’s ability to reduce the president’s impoundment authority remains an open constitutional question.

USAID HEAD PETER MAROCCO TELLS LAWMAKERS HE’S EYEING POTENTIAL CRIMINAL CHARGES FOR FOREIGN AID FRAUD: REPORT

Department of State v. Aids Vaccine Advocacy Coalition could become the Supreme Court case that provides the answer to the impoundment debate. It will become part of the broader challenges to President Trump’s efforts to remake the executive branch by reducing the federal workforce, shuttering offices, and narrowing federal interference in the economy and society.

It will be of a piece with the Trump administration’s campaign to exercise unitary control over all agencies within the executive branch. Even as challenges to the spending freeze move forward in the lower courts, Trump’s Justice Department is also defending the president’s authority to fire the heads of the so-called “independent agencies.” These agencies exercise sweeping authority over the economy and society: the SEC regulates the stock and bond markets; the NLRB controls public and private sector unions; the FCC the telephone, television, cable, radio, and internet networks; the FTC reviews every merger in the nation. President Trump has removed an NLRB commissioner and some insignificant officers who oversee federal employees – but without recognizing Congress’s demand that they be fired only for cause, such as abuse of power or breaking the law.

Constitutional theories concerning impoundment and agency control trace to the same source. Unlike its careful enumeration of the limited powers of Congress, the Constitution does not list the authorities of the executive branch. Narrowly read, Article II of the Constitution does not event grant the president the right to fire cabinet officers, only to appoint them with the advice and consent of the Senate. It does not explicitly require that those cabinet officers, or any inferior officers or employees even obey presidential commands. It does not explicitly give the president the power to set foreign policy or protect the national security.

Supreme Court temporarily allows Trump’s freeze on USAID paymentsVideo
But from the very beginning of the Constitution, the founders read the document to vest the power in the president to control the executive branch and to exercise the great authorities to enforce the law and to protect the nation.

Alexander Hamilton first explained the “unitary executive” theory during the fight over George Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation, which kept the U.S. out of the beginnings of what would become the Napoleonic Wars. Hamilton observed that Article II of the Constitution, which begins by vesting in the president “the executive power,” grants in him all executive powers of the federal government – except those the Constitution explicitly shares, such as over appointments or treaties.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINION

As Justice Antonin Scalia would put it in his famous dissent in Morrison v. Olson (1988), the Article II vesting clause “does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.”

From this basic insight, presidential power – especially the sort claimed by Trump in his fights over spending and removal – flows. The President cannot control the execution of federal law, as the Take Care Clause requires, if any inferior officer or even employee can choose to adopt his personal interpretation of the law or pursue her personal enforcement agenda.

Supreme Court Justices sitting for a portrait.
Author John Yoo says, “the Supreme Court would be wise to remember that the courts have little authority to interfere with the president’s control of the executive branch.” ( )

The president’s constitutional responsibility to see that the law is faithfully executed gives command over all executive branch personnel, from cabinet officials and heads of federal agencies on down. The Supreme Court agreed as long ago as Myers v. United States in 1926 (authored by former President Chief Justice William Howard Taft) and as recently as Seila Law v. CFPB in 2020 (authored by Chief Justice John Roberts) that this authority gives the president the authority to fire Senate-confirmed officers, including those who, by statute, are given protection from removal. One precedent, Humphrey’s Executor from 1935, still allows Congress to shield from presidential control the multi-member commissions, but the logic of the Roberts Court’s decisions sounds the death-knell for that lonely constitutional anomaly.

Trump’s effort to rein in USAID spending draws from this same wellspring of executive authority. Even though the Constitution does not locate a power over foreign policy and national security, the fight over Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation forever established in our political order that the function is rooted in the grant of the executive power in the president. Nothing could more demand the qualities of speed, decision, and energy, in Hamilton’s words, than foreign policy and national security. The last thing the Framers would have expected would be for disputes over our nation’s most foreign policy struggles to end up in the courts.

Trump’s opponents display their political weakness by rushing to the courts to resolve fights over spending and removal. The Constitution instead establishes Congress as the branch best suited to respond to a president who has over-used his powers. Congress can cut off funds, refuse to confirm officers, decline to pass legislation, and ultimately impeach a Chief Executive who refuses to enforce the law or carry out legitimate spending programs. Because Democrats have lost the national elections, they cannot face that there is actually no constitutional conflict between Congress and the president.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

A Republican Congress agrees with President Trump’s effort to downsize the federal government, reduce spending, and shrink the workforce.

The Supreme Court would be wise to remember that the courts have little authority to interfere with the president’s control of the executive branch and his setting of foreign and national security policy.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JOHN YOO

John Yoo is a distinguished visiting professor at the School of Civic Leadership and a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, the Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Related Topics
Opinion
Supreme Court
Donald Trump
Foreign Policy
Politics
Constitution
U.S.
Crime
Immigration
Terror
True Crime
Bryan Kohberger
Politics
Trump’s First 100 Days
Senate
House
Judiciary
Foreign Policy
Fox News Polls
Elections
World
U.N.
Conflicts
Terrorism
Disasters
Global Economy
Environment
Religion
Scandals
Opinion
Media
FOX Nation Coverage
Entertainment
Exclusives
Country Music
Royals
Gene Hackman
Blake Lively
Diddy
Game Shows
Hot Videos
Sports
NFL
College Football
MLB
NBA
NHL
Golf
Tennis
Soccer
UFC
WWE
Lifestyle
MAHA
Health
Travel
Food & Drink
Games & Quizzes
Deals
FOX Business
Personal Finance
Economy
Markets
Watchlist
Lifestyle
Real Estate
Tech
Science & Tech
Air & Space
Security
Innovation
Video Games
Military Tech
Planet Earth
Wild Nature
Games
Daily Crossword Puzzle
Downwords
Crazy Crystals Match 3 Game
Word Swap
Word Search
Mini Crossword Puzzle
Stack and Match Block Puzzle
5 Across the Letter Word Game
Watch Live
FOX News Shows
Programming Schedule
On Air Personalities
Full Episodes
Show Clips
News Clips
About
Contact Us
Careers
Fox Around the World
Advertise With Us
Media Relations
Corporate Information
Compliance
Apps & Products
FOX News Go
FOX Weather
FOX Nation
FOX Noticias
FOX News Shop
FOX News Radio
Outkick
Newsletters
Podcasts
U.S.
Crime
Immigration
Terror
True Crime
Bryan Kohberger
Politics
Trump’s First 100 Days
Senate
House
Judiciary
Foreign Policy
Fox News Polls
Elections
World
U.N.
Conflicts
Terrorism
Disasters
Global Economy
Environment
Religion
Scandals
Opinion
Media
FOX Nation Coverage
Entertainment
Exclusives
Country Music
Royals
Gene Hackman
Blake Lively
Diddy
Game Shows
Hot Videos
Sports
NFL
College Football
MLB
NBA
NHL
Golf
Tennis
Soccer
UFC
WWE
Lifestyle
MAHA
Health
Travel
Food & Drink
Games & Quizzes
Deals
FOX Business
Personal Finance
Economy
Markets
Watchlist
Lifestyle
Real Estate
Tech
Science & Tech
Air & Space
Security
Innovation
Video Games
Military Tech
Planet Earth
Wild Nature
Games
Daily Crossword Puzzle
Downwords
Crazy Crystals Match 3 Game
Word Swap
Word Search
Mini Crossword Puzzle
Stack and Match Block Puzzle
5 Across the Letter Word Game
Watch Live
FOX News Shows
Programming Schedule
On Air Personalities
Full Episodes
Show Clips
News Clips
About
Contact Us
Careers
Fox Around the World
Advertise With Us
Media Relations
Corporate Information
Compliance
Apps & Products
FOX News Go
FOX Weather
FOX Nation
FOX Noticias
FOX News Shop
FOX News Radio
Outkick
Newsletters
Podcasts
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Youtube
Flipboard
LinkedIn
Slack
RSS
Newsletters
Spotify
iHeartRadio
Fox News
Updated Terms of UseNew Privacy PolicyYour Privacy ChoicesClosed Caption PolicyHelpContact UsAccessibility Statement
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. ©2025 FOX News Network, LLC. All rights reserved. Quotes displayed in real-time or delayed by at least 15 minutes. Market data provided by Factset. Powered and implemented by FactSet Digital Solutions. Legal Statement. Mutual Fund and ETF data provided by Refinitiv Lipper.