What is going on at the SCOTUS with the USAID funding freeze?

A friend points out to me that the timeline here is beginning to get rather ominous.

Three weeks ago a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order to plaintiffs suing the Trump administration for freezing foreign aid funds that had already been appropriated by Congress. This is about as illegal as illegal can get, so granting a TRO was without doubt the appropriate response. The administration appealed the granting of the TRO to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, even though grants of TROs aren’t generally appealable. The DC Circuit immediately turned down the appeal, because what the Trump administration is doing is totally illegal on its face, plus again you normally can’t block this sort of interlocutory order at this point in litigation.

The administration’s lawyers waited until the literal 11th hour last Wednesday to appeal the DC Circuit’s action to the SCOTUS, which for all the reasons noted above should have routinely refused to consider it. So it wasn’t a good sign when John Roberts, who oversees appeals from the circuit, paused the operation of the already appealed District Court order requiring the Trump administration to release the already appropriated money.

Now what REALLY isn’t a good sign is that here we are six days later, and the SCOTUS as a whole hasn’t already gotten rid of this ridiculous appeal of a wildly illegal act on the part of the government. My friend writes:

This was an appeal from a TRO which is not appealable generally, the government waited until the 11th hour to say “whoops we can’t comply”, and the underlying issue is the President unilaterally deciding whether to spend money Congress appropriated. In other words, a slam dunk to dismiss and move on.

Unless one were fixing to radically overrule existing law to say nothing of the structure of our government itself.

Who knows what they’re doing but it’s not looking good.

I don’t think we can afford any more acts of world historical statesmanship like that recently provided us by Chief Justice John “I Managed to Bump Dred Scott From the #1 Slot for Worst Cases in SCOTUS History” Roberts.

ETA: The government is making an on its face frivolous argument that it can’t comply immediately because it will for mysterious reasons take “weeks” to restore the normal funding process that Trump stopped with an EO. This is obviously a lie, but it might be the kind of thing that would give the Sages of the Court some cover for continuing to stall, thereby granting Trump his win without a direct confrontation, since if the litigation lasts until the end of the fiscal year the case will become moot, at least in terms of any disbursements of current government funds, meaning litigation over this could then drag on for years, or at least until elections are canceled, whichever comes first.