US President Donald Trump is reportedly canceling a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund after pushback from Congress, including from Republican lawmakers.
On Monday, US media suggested the fund would be suspended, but the White House has yet to officially confirm this report.
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Axios first reported the news citing anonymous officials. “It’s dead for now,” officials told news outlets.
The “anti-weaponization” fund was announced last month as part of a settlement between President Trump and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), part of his executive branch.
According to documents released by the Justice Department, the $1.8 billion was earmarked for payments to victims of “law” and “use of arms” by the government.
Trump himself has repeatedly portrayed himself as such a victim, making himself and his allies targets of unwarranted government prosecutions.
Monday’s announcement came after President Trump spoke with House Speaker Mike Johnson about Republican concerns about “anti-weaponization” funds.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune has similarly called for the fund to be abolished in an effort to rally Republicans to pass a $72 billion immigration enforcement funding bill.
Still, Senate Democrats argued the reported moratorium wasn’t enough.
“President Trump has reportedly said he will commit a $2 billion MAGA slush fund,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said, using the acronym for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement.
“But promises from Trump are worth nothing. If Trump and the Republican Party truly abandon this corrupt program, they should have no problem outlawing it.”
Schumer pledged to push for legislation to “make sure the president can’t do something like this again.”
Inside the controversy
Plans for a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund were revealed on May 18, shortly after President Trump agreed to drop his lawsuit against the IRS.
Trump filed the lawsuit in January, alleging that the IRS was responsible for publishing information from his 2020 tax returns in The New York Times and ProPublica.
Republican leaders sought $10 billion in damages, but critics argued the lawsuit faced an uphill battle.
There were questions about whether it fell under the statute of limitations and whether the IRS could be held liable for the actions of outside contractor Charles Littlejohn, who was convicted of leaking documents.
The lawsuit and subsequent settlement also sparked protests over an apparent conflict of interest, as Trump heads the IRS and Justice Department and represented the agency during the court hearing.
After announcing a settlement of the lawsuit in May, the Justice Department unveiled plans to establish a fund.
Additional settlement documents were also released, stating that Trump and his family will be exempt from any IRS audits for life.
The Justice Department has not yet revealed who will be eligible for the “anti-weaponization” funds, but Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declined to exclude Trump supporters involved in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
legal challenge
The “anti-weaponization” fund has since been criticized as a piggy bank for payments to Trump’s allies and has faced both legal and congressional backlash.
At least three separate lawsuits have been filed seeking to end the “anti-weaponization” funds, including one filed by a police officer injured in the Jan. 6 attack.
Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked the creation of the fund while the court reviews the case.
Plaintiffs in the case are represented by the nonprofit group Democracy Forward, including former federal prosecutor Andrew Floyd, who was involved in the January 6 incident.
The third lawsuit was led by the government watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).
All three legal complaints challenged the Trump administration’s legal authority to establish the fund and cited the president’s conflicts of interest.
Separately, a federal judge in Florida who was scheduled to hear President Trump’s $10 billion IRS lawsuit reopened the case, citing details of the settlement that became public for the first time after the case was dropped.
In response to reports that the “anti-weaponization” fund had been suspended, CREW issued a statement saying it “should never have been proposed in the first place.”
“Mr. Trump’s reported temporary abandonment is not enough and does not resolve the legal issues raised by CREW and other lawsuits seeking to block the fund,” CREW’s lead attorney Nikel Sass told Al Jazeera.
“We will continue to pursue litigation until the illegal funds are shut down for good.”
Al Jazeera reached out to the White House for comment, which pointed to the Justice Department’s posts on social media and said it would abide by the court’s ruling suspending the fund.
“This fund is available to anyone, whether Democrat, Republican, conservative, independent, or otherwise, who has been armed, targeted, or persecuted,” the Justice Department said in a post.
parliamentary pressure
Even Republicans were skeptical of the “anti-weaponization” fund and the settlement as a whole.
“That doesn’t seem right,” Sen. Don Bacon of Nebraska told KMTV in Omaha. “You can’t do that when you’re bargaining with yourself for yourself.”
In an interview with CNN, outgoing North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, also a Republican, called the fund “a dividend pot for punks.”
Sens. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana also criticized the fund.
In a rare sign of Republican pushback, the Republican-led Senate last month delayed passage of a $72 billion funding bill for President Trump’s immigration enforcement initiative as part of a protest over the “anti-weaponization” fund.
The $1.8 billion earmarked for the fund would bypass Congressional approval and instead come from large sums of money used by the Justice Department to process government settlements.
Reports have surfaced that the White House has agreed to suspend “anti-weaponization” funds, with Senate Republicans suggesting $72 billion in immigration funding will be put back on track.
But Democrats on the Senate floor on Monday continued to express their anger.
“The president wants to give big restitution to his political associates and the criminals who attacked our democracy at his behest,” said Sen. Dick Durbin. “It smells like corruption.”
