May 18, 2026
The unprecedented lawsuit President Donald Trump brought against the Internal Revenue Service over the unauthorized disclosure of his tax returns years ago has led to an unprecedented arrangement that will make nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer funds available to allies of the president who say they were unfairly investigated by the government in the past.
The announcement of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” by the Justice Department on Monday immediately drew criticism from Democrats, public interest groups and former government officials who argued that Trump was using the levers of the government he controls to set up a vast piggybank for his supporters.
“It’s highly unusual. It seems to me that it’s a fairly thinly veiled attempt to funnel federal money to people that are sympathetic to the president’s cause and points of view without following the kind of usual procedures,” said retired Judge William Smith, who was appointed to the federal bench in Rhode Island by former President George W. Bush.
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Is this similar to the Keepseagle case?
The Justice Department statement said there was precedent for the fund, pointing specifically to a compensation program that sprung out of an Obama-era settlement DOJ reached in a case accusing the Department of Agriculture of discrimination against tribal farmers and ranchers.
However, an attorney who was deeply involved in that case, known as Keepseagle v. Vilsack, said that the two circumstances were completely different.
A traditional settlement was approved in the class action case in 2011 and carried out under the oversight of a court. But when the settlement claims were paid, $380 million of the $680 million payout had remained unclaimed and there were no terms in the settlement allowing that money to go back to the government.
After extensive negotiations, the parties agreed to create a program dispersing grants to organizations that served Native American ranching and farming communities – the same communities that were in the original class of the lawsuit.
“That really is the critical issue. You have to serve the same community whose interests were at stake in the litigation that was brought,” said the lawyer who represented the Native Americans behind the case, Joseph Sellers.
A judge oversaw the plan to create that fund and even approved of the criteria it would use to determine who would be eligible for the grants.
“Even then, we had to satisfy the court that the funds were going to be dispersed in a way that served the same interests of the communities that brought the case,” Sellers told CNN.
The Trump-IRS deal contemplates no such judicial oversight of the new fund. In fact, his lawyers’ otherwise brief dismissal notice went out of its way to stress that the judge had no role to play now that he was dropping the case.
Ironically, the Keepseagle fund attracted harsh Republican criticism, and Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, issued a memo that barred any DOJ settlement that “directs or provides for a payment or loan to any non-governmental person or entity that is not a party to the dispute.”
Under the current DOJ policy, any settlement that creates a payment program for parties not in a dispute “must have a strong connection to the underlying violation or violations of federal law at issue in the enforcement action.”
Read What to Know About Trump’s $1.8 Billion Taxpayer-Fueled Fund for His Allies.