Since the nation’s founding, the federal government has tried a variety of ways to pay people who have been harmed by the actions of U.S. officials.  At times, the effort has led to scandal as demands on the Treasury multiplied.

In some sense, though, this was a noble idea.  President Abraham Lincoln, for example, told Congress in 1861: “It is as much the duty of government to render prompt justice against itself, in favor of citizens, as it is to administer the same between private individuals.”  His call for Congress to reform the process opened a new chapter in that long history.

President Trump is now seeking to open another new chapter, with a plan for doling out close to $2 billion from the Treasury to compensate for what he claims was widespread legal wrongdoing against him and his allies over the years.

His plan, to create a so-called “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” is highly controversial and is already immersed deeply in legal doubt.  On Wednesday, an attempt to block the project before it gets put fully together began in a federal court in Washington, D.C.

The lawsuit was filed by two of the police officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, against a mob seeking to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.   One of them, Harry Dunn, is now retired from the Capitol police force.  The other, Daniel Hodges, is still active as a Washington policeman. (The text of the lawsuit includes a photo of Hodges, nearly being crushed by the rioters.)

The officers recite a series of threats to them as well as violent encounters since the Capitol riot, coming from those who took part as rioters.  Trump and other government officials, the lawsuit said, have indicated that those who joined in the Capitol assault could be eligible for payments from Trump’s new fund. The two officers claim that the rioters – all of whom have been given pardons by Trump – not only would be eligible to be paid by the fund, but also would use the money to carry out more threats to the officers and to the public.

A key issue, and one that a federal judge must resolve before the officers’ case could move forward at all, is whether the two have a legal right to sue (technically, “standing” to sue).  In order to prove they have that right, the two must show that they will be harmed personally (in the legal sense) by creation of the fund and by the payments to be made, that the harms done to them were directly caused by the operation of the fund and its plan for payments, and that a court can fashion a remedy for them.

The threat issue will be a central factor for each requirement to be met in the lawsuit.  Another core question for the judge, at the outset, is whether the lawsuit is premature because the new plan is just now being set up.

The lawsuit makes these claims of violations of law by Trump, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent:

• Creation of the fund violated federal law by establishing a new federal agency, which only Congress has the power to do.

• No payments can be made out of the existing federal Judgment Fund (the planned source of the $1.8 billion Trump wants paid as compensation), because Congress has not given permission.
• Any plan for deciding who gets payments and how the fund will operate were not authorized by any existing law.
• No legal basis exists in federal law for anyone to seek payment as compensation for allegedly facing “weaponization” at the hands of federal law enforcement.
• The new fund is not a proper method for settling lawsuits that Trump had previously filed. Those cases, now abandoned, were based on challenges to public release of his private tax records, to federal agents’ search of his Florida club and home (Mar-a-Lago), and to a federal investigation of Russian interference that aided Trump’s first election, in 2016.
• Any payments made to those who rioted at the Capitol in 2021 would violate a clause in the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment (ratified after the Civil War) that bars any government payment that would cover any expense or obligation that anyone “incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” (Several of those who were convicted for their roles in the riot have said publicly that they want to recover the money that they had spent on defense lawyers.)

If some or all of those claims are proved in the case filed by the officers (they want the case to be tried by a jury), their lawsuit asks the court to:

• Rule that creation of the Trump fund is illegal, and forbid steps to put it into operation.
• Rule that any orders to actually make payments to anyone are or will be illegal.
• Specifically forbid any payments to those who rioted at the Capitol in 2021, and recover any payments if any have been made to them already.

If a jury tries the case, its role would be to establish the facts.  Any legal questions would be for the judge to decide.

Under the Trump plan, as laid out in legal papers made public in recent days, the funds would come out of the 50-year-old “Judgment Fund,” which Congress created to simplify the process of paying those who had legitimate claims of wrongdoing by government officials or agencies.

From the early days of the nation, in the late 18^th Century, claims were usually processed through specific bills considered in Congress.  Over time, though, so many claims were filed that Congress was bogged down with them, so it moved to shift the processing to the courts – a method suggested by President Lincoln — and ultimastely, in 1956, to the Judgment Fund, set up within the Treasury.

The Judgment Fund is unlimited, and is expected always to have enough money in it to make payments to those with convincing claims.  Although the Constitution specifies that no government money can be spent, on anything, without Congress’s passage of an appropriations bill, the Judgment Fund exists without that being done over and over; it has a permanent appropriation.

Although the Constitution specifies that the federal government must disclose “from time to time” its spending of federal money, government poiicy experts who have studied the Judgment Fund’s history have argued that such disclosures have been so limited that no one in the public has any dependable way of knowing what was spent or who received payments.

For those who seek payments under the Trump plan, the operators of the plan are not to disclose “personal and financial information” about them.

Among the most controversial parts of the overall Trump plan, the Internal Revenue Service would be forbidden “forever” to do any tax audits of Trump, his family and his business firms, if filed before the new plan was created.