Taxpayers get the victory as Trump’s anti-weaponization fund dies

President Donald Trump’s decision to drop the Justice Department’s planned anti-weaponization fund is a win for taxpayers — who shouldn’t have to pay for the partisan political machinery that makes such a fund necessary. 

Trump has faced relentless, extraordinary efforts to destroy him outside of heretofore normal political combat.

The FBI raided Mar-a-Lago over alleged mishandling of classified materials despite its own agents’ doubts about probable cause.

Officials in Colorado, Maine and Illinois sought to remove him from the 2024 ballot, using a Civil War-era constitutional clause, before the Supreme Court unanimously reversed them.

Trump’s infamous mugshot is the result of Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis booking him on a racketeering indictment that subsequently collapsed.

And a civil case brought by writer E. Jean Carroll, funded in part by a prominent Democratic donor, resulted in damages of nearly $90 million — despite Carroll being unable to recall what year the alleged encounter took place.

That’s important context behind the debate that overwhelmed the now cancelled $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, which was proposed to settle Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. 

The fund would have awarded money to victims of lawfare unduly targeted by a Justice Department that engaged in politically motivated prosecutions.

The president’s critics, not unreasonably, asked whether the fund was legal, given that the beneficiaries had no standing in the original case.

They also questioned whether the commission established to award the funds was genuinely independent.

But they shied away from the broader uncomfortable truth: Donald Trump wasn’t proposing to do anything his predecessors didn’t do.

He was simply, as is his style, doing it more openly, without apology or subterfuge.

Consider what happened in the final weeks of the Biden administration.

As the lame-duck period wound down, billions of dollars went out the door to Democrat-aligned organizations that could fund, salary and support a network of political activity designed to weather the opposition years in well-funded comfort until they were back in power.

An Environmental Protection Agency official, caught on camera in the Biden administration’s final weeks by a Project Veritas undercover reporter, described the scramble to get money out the door before Trump’s inauguration as “throwing gold bars off the Titanic.”

What did that look like in practice?

A group that Democratic favorite Stacey Abrams advised received $2 billion in EPA funds in 2024 despite having reported just a hundred dollars in revenue the previous year.

But don’t worry, taxpayer: the $2 billion came with a requirement that the grantees complete basic budgeting training within 90 days.

The real victims in all of this, whether we’re talking about Biden-era grants or Trump’s now-canceled fund, are American taxpayers.

It’s taxpayers who fund the political machinery, and taxpayers who are then asked to fund the cleanup operation.

And this comes against a backdrop of revelations about fraud that should make every taxpayer’s blood run cold: systematic abuse across Medicare, defrauded child autism programs and a sprawling ecosystem of non-profits — ostensibly devoted to home health care, child care, learning centers and more — that has treated public money as a trough of private resources.

Working people and middle-class families pay for these scandals out of every paycheck while worrying about rent, mortgages, college tuition, medical bills and whether or not they’ll be able to retire with any dignity at all.

Neither political party should have billions of dollars to distribute to its allies.

But the solution is less money in government hands altogether.

The principle the Anti-Weaponization Fund aimed to address is not unreasonable.

President Trump is not the only American to have been caught in the crosshairs of politicized prosecutions — and people who were persecuted by a weaponized justice system should have some avenue of redress.

Yet however much Trump may sympathize with the victims of political prosecutions, knowing what it feels like doesn’t make it right to send taxpayers the bill for fixing it.

The truth here is one that neither party wants to acknowledge, because both parties benefit from the status quo: The endless cycle of grift that lets money flow to allies is too expensive for the everyday Americans footing the bill.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund may have been well-meaning and may have redressed some real wrongs — but that’s not a good reason to perpetuate a cycle that needs to stop. 

The bill, as always, goes to the taxpayer.

Maud Maron is a New York attorney and education advocate. Adapted from The Spectator.