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Attorneys for the Trump administration made an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night to permit it to withhold billions in foreign aid spending that Congress had previously approved. The request to the justices returns the case over funding for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the nation’s high court for the second time in six months.

The $12 billion in question is comprised of nearly $12 billion in aid the administration set aside for USAID, money that must be obligated to projects by September 30, when the federal government’s fiscal year ends. Last month, President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day back in the White House in January, directing the federal government to pause nearly all foreign aid spending. The president explained that his action was part of a “war on waste, fraud, and abuse,” especially as it pertained to overseas spending.

The order was subsequently challenged in court, and in February, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali in Washington, D.C. blocked the administration from withholding the funds. Ali’s ruling found that the White House was required to continue to release funds that Congress had already authorized. Ali’s decision forced the Trump administration to resume disbursements of billions of dollars in USAID grants.

Trump’s administration has fought back. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit returned to the case, voting 2-1 to overturn the injunction from Judge Ali. Judge Karen L. Henderson, who was appointed to the D.C. Circuit by former President George H.W. Bush, wrote for the majority. In the opinion, Henderson found that the plaintiffs — the foreign aid groups that are seeking the restoration of their grant payments — did not have the legal standing necessary to bring the lawsuit against the administration. In the ruling, Henderson wrote that the groups did not have a proper “cause of action” under what is known as the doctrine of impoundment.

While the ruling from the appeals court represents a major victory for Trump, the case has not yet formally gone into effect. The court has not yet issued a so-called mandate on the ruling, a delay that has left the order from Ali and the payment schedule he put in place technically on the books. As a result, the administration is in a race against the clock in an effort to avoid the order that could force the administration to pay out the full $12 billion before the fiscal year ends at the end of September.

In his arguments to the Supreme Court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who filed the emergency request with the court on Tuesday, argued that the government will be required to “rapidly obligate some $12 billion in foreign-aid funds” by September 30 in accordance with Ali’s order. He wrote that the question at hand should not be a matter for the federal court system to resolve. Sauer maintained that Congress had not “disturb[ed] the delicate interbranch balance” by allowing for “unlimited, unconstrained private suits.”

“Congress did not upset the delicate interbranch balance by allowing for unlimited, unconstrained private suits,” Sauer wrote in his emergency filing with the court. “It is not for the courts to say that that result must be obtained in the narrow way the plaintiffs imagine.”

The plaintiffs in the case, which are a group of foreign aid organizations that depend on USAID funds to run their overseas programs, would argue the opposite. The plaintiff’s main claim in the case is that the president does not have the power to hold money that Congress has already appropriated. The plaintiffs point to the Impoundment Control Act (ICA), a federal statute from the 1970s that the Congressional Research Service says was intended to “curb presidential power to unilaterally withhold funds appropriated by Congress.” The plaintiffs also point to the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Supreme Court is unlikely to hear oral arguments on the matter, instead likely to grant the request or refuse the request in a brief order. The justices agreed to take up a similar dispute in an early June 5-4 ruling. The earlier case pitted the State Department and the Department of Justice against the American Farm Bureau Federation over withheld aid to Israel.