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The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Tuesday night to lift a lower court order that could force it to release billions of dollars in previously approved foreign aid spending.

Attorneys for the government filed an emergency appeal with the high court on Tuesday, asking the justices to allow it to block billions of dollars in foreign aid spending that Congress had already appropriated. The action, if granted, would once again return the USAID spending fight to the Supreme Court for the second time in just six months.

In question is nearly $12 billion in aid that the U.S. Agency for International Development had previously set aside for foreign aid, and which Congress ordered be spent before the fiscal year closes on September 30.

President Donald Trump has been quick to act since his return to the White House in January, signing an executive order on his first day back in office that told the federal government to stop all but about 1% of foreign aid payments. Trump justified the move as a means to address what he said was rampant “waste, fraud, and abuse” in foreign spending.

Judge Amir Ali of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the administration’s freeze in February. Ali, in his decision, ruled that the White House was “required to release” the money for projects that Congress had already signed off on. Judge Ali also ordered the Trump administration to restart its disbursement of billions in USAID grants.

The Trump administration pushed back against Judge Ali’s decision. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit took up the case earlier this month and ruled 2-1 to overturn Ali’s injunction. In her majority opinion, Judge Karen L. Henderson, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, said that the plaintiffs in the case — foreign aid groups hoping to resume their grant payments — did not have a proper legal avenue to sue the government in the first place. Henderson wrote that the foreign aid groups lacked a proper “cause of action” under a legal concept known as the doctrine of impoundment.

The appeals court’s move, even as it rejected the White House’s impoundment argument, was a major victory for Trump and his allies. But the court has yet to issue a formal mandate carrying out its decision. That has left Judge Ali’s order — and the payment schedule it required — in effect, at least for the time being. The Trump administration is now on a ticking clock to prevent being forced to disburse all $12 billion by the end of the fiscal year on September 30.

In Tuesday’s filing, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who submitted the emergency request to the Supreme Court, asked the court to “stay the injunction pending the Court’s disposition of this application.” He continued, saying the U.S. “will otherwise be required to rapidly obligate some $12 billion in foreign-aid funds” before September 30. Sauer noted in the filing that the court should not be resolving the dispute between the plaintiffs and the government. Instead, he argued, it should be left to “the political branches.”

“Congress did not upset the delicate interbranch balance by allowing for unlimited, unconstrained private suits,” Sauer wrote in the filing. “If the district court’s order stands, 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 groups that brought the lawsuit — and their brief in response to the Trump administration’s filing — offer a very different view of the case. The plaintiffs, a collection of foreign aid groups whose work depends on USAID money, say Trump can’t unilaterally block funding that Congress has already appropriated.

The plaintiffs point to the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), a 1970s law that was intended to rein in presidential overreach when it comes to federal spending. The plaintiffs also point to the Administrative Procedure Act as a statutory basis for their legal claims.

In its decision to grant or deny the emergency appeal, the Supreme Court could have major implications for both foreign aid spending in the short term and the limits on presidential power more broadly. The court has already, in the form of an unsigned, unsigned, narrow 5-4 ruling, had a hand in the dispute earlier this year. With the fiscal deadline looming and billions of dollars in spending at stake, the high court is once again being drawn into the fight.

For the Trump administration, the case is about gaining more control over spending priorities and streamlining the foreign aid process. For the aid organizations, it’s a fight over their very existence: without the money they have been promised, aid projects already underway across the world could be pared back or, in some cases, completely closed down.

With the appeals court’s decision still in effect and with time running out for the administration, the Supreme Court’s decision on how to handle this emergency appeal could have implications not just for $12 billion in foreign aid, but for the limits of presidential power when it comes to congressionally approved spending.