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Trump administration lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night, asking the justices to let it stop billions of dollars of foreign aid spending that Congress had already approved. It’s the second time this year that the issue of funding the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, has gone to the Supreme Court.

The executive branch’s emergency request to the Supreme Court late Tuesday night on the long-standing case with USAID over impoundment was a way to stall further spending of funds that the Trump administration had earlier tried to withhold. The almost $12 billion at stake in this fight was appropriated to USAID earlier this year and must be obligated by the end of this fiscal year on Sept. 30.

In January, President Donald Trump, who just returned from an overseas trip, signed an executive order that he said would direct the federal government to stop the disbursement of nearly all foreign aid payments. The president described the order as a sweeping initiative to stop “waste, fraud, and abuse” in how the government spends money on programs overseas.

Challenged in court soon after it was signed, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali of Washington, D.C., barred the administration from blocking the USAID payments in February. Ali, an Obama appointee, ruled that the White House has a duty to release money for projects that Congress has already approved. He required the Trump administration to resume payments on billions of dollars in USAID grants.

The Trump administration has challenged that ruling. In a 2-1 decision earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated Ali’s injunction against the White House’s withholding of the grant payments. Writing for the majority, Judge Karen L. Henderson, a George H.W. Bush appointee, said the foreign aid groups seeking to have their grant payments restored — the plaintiffs in this case — did not have a “cause of action” to sue the administration. Henderson argued in her opinion that the groups did not have a proper basis under the doctrine of impoundment, under which the dispute in this case has been litigated in federal court.

Judge Henderson’s opinion for the majority does not yet weigh a mandate from the D.C. Circuit, as the court has yet to issue a formal mandate to implement its opinion. As a result, Judge Ali’s order from February that requires the administration to pay out certain USAID grants is still in effect. Unless the Supreme Court grants the Trump administration’s emergency application, the payment schedule Ali laid out in February, which runs through September 30, will remain in place.

The government has moved rapidly in the interim to try to avoid the scenario in which it is forced to disburse $12 billion before the fiscal year ends. In an emergency application to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, the administration argued that unless the Supreme Court steps in, federal courts will force it to “rapidly obligate some $12 billion in foreign-aid funds” before September 30. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who filed the Supreme Court request on behalf of the Trump administration, argued that the dispute is better left to the so-called political branches of government.

“This Court should not be put in the business of maintaining the books of appropriations or contracts law by converting unreviewable decisions of the Executive to effectively reviewable ones through judicial fact-finding and application of open-ended substantive legal standards,” Sauer wrote in the filing.

“The plaintiffs’ suit,” Sauer’s filing continued, “thus lies at the core of what Justice Jackson, writing for the Court, called ‘the perennial problem of unauthorized private suits intruding upon areas of exclusive field preemption.’ Congress did not upset the delicate interbranch balance by allowing for unlimited, unconstrained private suits.”

The plaintiffs in this case, which are a group of foreign aid organizations whose work is funded through USAID grants, would likely strongly dispute such an argument. The plaintiffs, which include organizations like Citizens Against War in Lebanon and Karuna Trust, argue that the president does not have the unilateral ability to prevent the spending of funds that Congress has already designated to go to the foreign aid budget.

The ICA, a 1970s law that bars a president from withholding funding Congress has approved, and the Administrative Procedure Act are the two major statutory laws on which the plaintiffs base their claims.

The D.C. Circuit’s decision earlier this month was a major victory for Trump in this legal fight, but the administration is running out of time before its fight with Congress over the foreign aid budget becomes an even bigger problem. The clock is ticking, and in order to be able to unilaterally decide what to spend where before the Sept. 30 deadline, the administration is turning to the Supreme Court to take immediate action. In early June, the high court already issued a narrow 5-4 ruling on a similar case. Now, the legal question is whether the justices are willing to once again intervene and end a fight over billions of dollars in foreign aid.