WASHINGTON >> A federal judge barred the government today from taking steps to launch President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion fund, for now prohibiting the establishment of the fund, which is intended to pay people the administration finds were harmed by the federal government.
The brief order by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia prohibits the government from establishing the fund or processing disbursements at least until a hearing is held in June in a pending lawsuit challenging its legality.
The order came in a case brought by a group of individuals and entities who say they have faced partisan attacks by the Trump administration, but who say they expect to be excluded from accessing the fund.
The halt provided the first meaningful, if potentially temporary, roadblock to efforts to compensate the president’s political allies since plans for the fund were formalized this month. At least two other lawsuits challenging the fund have also been filed in the District of Columbia and in California, and a number of lawmakers, including prominent Republicans, have publicly objected to its aims.
Trump has celebrated the fund as a source of relief for victims of “weaponization and lawfare” under Democratic administrations, and a number of Trump’s allies, including rioters convicted of crimes during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, have announced plans to apply.
Brinkema, a Clinton appointee, described the order as necessary to preserve the status quo and to “ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed” until she holds an initial hearing in the case on June 12. Until then, her order prohibited “the transferring of money to the fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the fund.”
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The fund originated this month with a remarkable deal Mr. Trump struck to conclude a case he had filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax information between 2018 and 2020.
In response, the Justice Department announced that $1.776 billion would be set aside for other individuals who claimed to have been victimized by the federal government. Department officials said people would be able to apply for compensation to a five-member commission whose membership Trump would control.
The Justice Department has argued that the commission tasked with evaluating claims will assess each neutrally, and that the payment structure is legal under the Judgment Fund, an unlimited source of money that Congress authorized the Justice Department to use to settle lawsuits filed against the federal government.
A spokesperson for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the ruling Friday.
The Justice Department has said Trump will not personally draw money from the fund. But as part of the deal, the department also granted Trump and his family immunity from ongoing audits of their taxes, an arrangement that could save the family and their businesses as much as $100 million.
The group that brought the lawsuit includes a former federal prosecutor who said he was fired for his work on the Jan. 6 investigation, and a professor in California who was arrested while protesting an immigration raid. In court filings, they contend that they have been the victims of genuine partisan persecution, but under Trump.
Other plaintiffs include the city of New Haven, Connecticut, which said the Trump administration had slashed its federal funding in retaliation for its “sanctuary city” law enforcement policies, and the National Abortion Federation, which contended its members could face violent extremism by right-wing activists empowered by the fund.
Lawyers representing the coalition argued that the fund appeared to be a political project designed to enrich supporters of the president, potentially including some who had been convicted of breaking the law in an effort to keep Trump in power following the 2020 election.
In a sworn statement in the case, Andrew Floyd, the former federal prosecutor, described working his way up through the Justice Department since 2014, culminating in his work leading a task force investigating assaults on police officers after the Jan. 6 riot. Floyd said he was fired in 2025 despite an otherwise stellar record in the department.
“The president’s ‘anti-weaponization fund’ is not a serious attempt to redress the weaponization and abuse of government power,” he wrote. “While I have been targeted by the abusive exercise of government power, the elected official responsible is a Republican, not a Democrat, and by its own terms the fund is not available to me.”
Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, a legal nonprofit representing the assorted plaintiffs, described the order as “a victory for transparency, the rule of law, and the American people.”
“No administration has the authority to spend public money through a political rewards program that Congress never authorized,” she said in a statement.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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