A Slush Fund for the Faithful, While America Pays the Check
The Trump administration is preparing to route $1.776 billion in taxpayer dollars to a “Truth and Justice Commission” that will pay claims by the president’s own allies — including, potentially, pardoned January 6 defendants. The deal would settle a lawsuit the president filed against the government he runs. It is a portrait of a leader who has lost the plot.
There is a particular kind of contempt for the American public required to spend $1.776 billion of public money compensating one’s own friends in a year when working families have watched the price of ground beef climb roughly 17 percent year over year, when childcare costs have surged nearly 40 percent since 2019, and when seven in ten Americans now say raising a child is unaffordable. That contempt is the common thread running through the deal President Trump’s Department of Justice is now finalizing — and through the leadership crisis it exposes.
The proposal, first reported by ABC News and confirmed by The New York Times, would have the federal government create a so-called “President Donald J. Trump Truth and Justice Commission,” funded with $1,776,000,000 in taxpayer money — a figure reportedly chosen as a “nod to the nation’s founding.” In exchange, Mr. Trump will drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, along with separate $230 million in claims tied to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago and the Russia investigation. The commission’s five members will be appointed by the attorney general, four of them removable by the president without cause. It will not be required to disclose how it allocates the money.
This is not a settlement. It is a self-dealing arrangement dressed in the language of justice — a payout from the government to people the president personally favors, paid for by taxpayers who cannot afford rent.
1. The Deal in Plain Terms
Stripped of its founding-mythos branding, the Truth and Justice Commission does three things at once: it terminates a lawsuit in which the president was suing the executive branch he commands, it transfers more than a billion and a half taxpayer dollars to a discretionary fund with virtually no oversight, and it positions that fund to pay claims from the people most personally and politically aligned with the man approving it.
The structural problems are not theoretical. The judge overseeing the IRS suit, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, had already begun questioning whether the case could even proceed, asking the parties to justify whether they were “sufficiently adverse” when the plaintiff is the sitting president and the defendants are agencies he runs. The administration’s own Justice Department lawyers conceded in a court filing that Mr. Trump has “extraordinary” control over the defendants. The commission is, in effect, the workaround.
The Sum
$1.776B
Taxpayer money proposed for a discretionary fund whose disbursements need not be publicly disclosed. Drawn from Treasury’s Judgment Fund — without a single congressional vote.
Who Gets Paid
~1,600
The pool of potential claimants includes the roughly 1,600 individuals charged in connection with the January 6 attack on the Capitol, all since pardoned by the president. Trump-affiliated entities may also be eligible, per ABC News.
The Oversight
Zero
Four of five commission members would be appointed by the attorney general; the president could remove any of them without cause. The body would face no disclosure obligation for how it allocates the money.
What He Drops
$10.23B
Mr. Trump’s $10 billion IRS suit plus roughly $230 million in personal claims tied to Mar-a-Lago and the Russia probe. The president sues the government he runs; the government settles by paying his friends.
2. The Math of Misplaced Priorities
Set the constitutional questions aside for a moment and consider only the optics — though “optics” understates what is happening here. Americans are not in a forgiving mood about prices. Bureau of Labor Statistics data released May 12 show food inflation again ticking up, reaching its highest annualized rate in nearly three years. Ground beef is up double digits. Coffee, by some measures, is up nearly 20 percent. A Stanford economist quoted by Bloomberg calls affordability the dominant electoral concern heading into November’s midterms. Delinquency rates on consumer borrowing have climbed to a nearly decade high.
And the costs are not random. Congressional analyses cited in coverage of the 2026 grocery shock attribute roughly $2,500 per household per year to tariff-related cost increases. Enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies expired on December 31, sending some Americans into the new year unable to afford their insurance premiums at all. Employer-sponsored coverage is projected to rise 6 to 7 percent this year. These are not abstractions; they are the quiet arithmetic of households deciding what they will go without.
One-point-seven-seven-six billion dollars is what the federal government would need to fully fund the ACA enhanced subsidies for several states for a year. It is what a meaningful child tax credit expansion might cost. It is what could pay for tens of thousands of teachers, or expand SNAP for hungry children, or shore up rural hospitals closing across the country. Instead, the administration has chosen — has chosen — to spend it on the president’s friends.
“A billion dollars for a ballroom; $1.7 billion for a slush fund for the president’s friends.”
— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), May 16, 2026
3. Where the Money Actually Goes
The administration insists the commission will compensate “victims of weaponization” — the catch-all phrase Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has used to describe political opponents of the first administration who were investigated under his successor. In practice, the list of likely recipients tells a more straightforward story.
It is a story about who the president believes is owed something by the American taxpayer. The roadmap is already visible. Last year, the administration paid nearly $5 million to the estate of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by Capitol Police as she tried to breach the Speaker’s Lobby during the January 6 attack. Two figures who sued over the Russia probe — including former Trump adviser Carter Page — received $1.25 million each. The Department of Justice has, according to Rep. Raskin’s investigation, ordered the FBI to pay millions to former agents disciplined for misconduct ranging from classified leaks to entering the Capitol during the January 6 riot.
Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment is explicit: no federal money may be spent to compensate participants in insurrection or rebellion. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has argued on the record that paying pardoned January 6 defendants from this fund would be flatly unconstitutional. Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, no progressive, told ABC News he could not understand how the arrangement was even permissible.
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4. An Appropriation Without Congress
There is a reason the framers placed the power of the purse in Article I, with the legislature. They did not want a single person — particularly a single person with personal stakes — directing public money to favored recipients. Yet that is precisely what the proposed commission accomplishes. Money would be drawn from the Treasury’s Judgment Fund, an account meant for paying out the results of adjudicated claims, not for funding a discretionary commission set up to pay the president’s allies in exchange for him dropping his own lawsuit.
Rep. Raskin’s diagnosis, delivered on This Week on May 17, was direct: only Congress may appropriate, Congress did not appropriate this, and Congress would not. The arrangement is, in his words, an “invention” of the executive.
“All of this is outside of the Constitution. All of it is outside of congressional spending power, and so it is illegal.”
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ABC’s This Week, May 17, 2026
5. The Question of Leadership
The Truth and Justice Commission is not an isolated policy failure. It is the latest data point in a pattern that has been building for months. Earlier this year, Mr. Trump announced a $250 million White House ballroom project. The administration has continued to insist that inflation is “plummeting” while families tell pollsters the opposite. His public statements — including those documented in Rep. Raskin’s April 10 letter to the White House physician — have grown markedly more disordered, prompting bipartisan questions about fitness to which the administration has responded with insults rather than answers.
This is what a president who has lost touch with the country looks like. Not a president whose policies one disagrees with; that is ordinary politics. A president who genuinely cannot see — or no longer cares — that compensating his friends with $1.776 billion of taxpayer money in this economy is morally indefensible. That is something else entirely. That is a leadership failure of a constitutional dimension.
When the Question Stops Being Political and Becomes Constitutional
The mechanism. Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment permits the vice president, together with a majority of the Cabinet — or “such other body as Congress may by law provide” — to declare that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” Power transfers to the vice president as acting president. If the president objects, Congress decides, requiring a two-thirds vote in both chambers to sustain the removal.
Who is calling for it, and why. Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of House Judiciary, introduced legislation in April to establish a 17-member Commission on Presidential Capacity — the “other body” the amendment contemplates. Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, and Rep. Maxine Waters of California have all explicitly invoked the amendment in recent months. Even former Trump White House counsel Ty Cobb has publicly questioned the president’s fitness.
The constitutional argument. Section 4 does not require a clinical diagnosis. It requires that the president be unable to discharge the duties of office. A president who directs $1.776 billion of public money to his own friends in violation of the Appropriations Clause, who attempts to settle a lawsuit he filed against the government he commands, and who appears materially indifferent to the affordability crisis facing the citizens he serves, has demonstrated something the framers were trying to anticipate: a chief executive whose actions can no longer be reconciled with the office. The pattern of self-dealing is itself evidence of incapacity to faithfully execute the laws.
An honest assessment of the barriers
Section 4 has never been invoked. It would require Vice President J.D. Vance and a majority of the Cabinet to act against the man who appointed them — a politically extraordinary step. Rep. Raskin’s legislation, even if passed by a future Congress, would face challenge. Many constitutional scholars argue Section 4 was intended for cases of medical incapacity, not for corruption or policy malfeasance, which the framers placed within the impeachment power.
Why the case still stands. The barriers are political, not moral. The fact that a remedy is hard to obtain does not mean the underlying condition does not exist. The 25th Amendment is in the Constitution because the framers understood that incapacity wears many faces. A president who confuses the public treasury with his personal account is no less unable to discharge his duties than one who is medically incapacitated — and arguably more dangerous to the republic, because he is still signing the orders.
6. What Congress Can Do Now
Even setting Section 4 aside, Congress is not powerless. It can pass legislation restricting the use of the Judgment Fund for political compensation, as Rep. Raskin has called for. It can subpoena documents and testimony from the Justice Department officials structuring the commission. The federal courts — Judge Williams included — retain authority to scrutinize the underlying settlement. State attorneys general have standing to challenge unconstitutional appropriations. And the voters, in November, retain the most powerful remedy of all.
None of these remedies are easy. None of them are guaranteed. But the alternative — accepting that a president may dispose of nearly two billion dollars of public money to compensate his political allies while families decide whether to buy groceries or pay rent — is not a tolerable status quo for a constitutional republic.
Editorial Conclusion
The Truth and Justice Commission is not a settlement. It is the conversion of a public treasury into a personal patronage account, transacted by a president who is suing the government he commands.
The financial harm is enormous. The constitutional harm is worse. A leader who can no longer distinguish between the country’s money and his friends’ deserved comfort is not fit to direct either.
Congress must act. The courts must scrutinize. And the American public — already paying more for less of everything — must remember who, exactly, was being compensated, and who, exactly, was paying the bill.
Sources & References
- ABC News · Trump administration to create $1.776B ‘Truth and Justice Commission’ to compensate allies
- ABC News · Trump poised to drop IRS suit, launch $1.7B ‘weaponization’ fund for allies
- ABC News · Top Judiciary Democrat Raskin blasts possible Trump-IRS settlement
- Fortune · Trump’s IRS suit may end with a $1.7 billion compensation fund
- Fox 5 DC · Trump seeks $1.7 billion fund to pay allies in exchange for dropping IRS lawsuit
- House Judiciary Democrats · Raskin investigation into DOJ payments to disciplined FBI agents
- House Judiciary Democrats · Raskin demands White House physician evaluate Trump’s cognitive fitness
- The Daily Beast · Trump, 79, faces congressional bid to invoke 25th Amendment
- Axios · Raskin demands Trump cognitive test in 25th Amendment push
- TIME · What to know about the 25th Amendment as lawmakers call for Trump’s removal
- International Bar Association · Comment and analysis: President Trump and the 25th Amendment
- Bloomberg · Why Americans feel squeezed by the cost of living
- CBS News · Three charts highlight the affordability issues Americans worry about most
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · Consumer Price Index Summary, April 2026
- USDA Economic Research Service · Food Price Outlook: Summary Findings
- MSNBC / Maddow Blog · Trump’s Justice Department backs reimbursements for some Jan. 6 criminals
- Mediaite · ABC drops scathing new details on Trump’s $1.7 billion IRS deal
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