Blanche kills the $1.8 billion fund, and the standoff is over

The $1.8 billion fund is dead on paper now. Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general and President Trump’s nominee for the job permanently, formally rescinded the so-called anti-weaponization fund on Sunday night, issuing the written order that two Republican senators had demanded as the price of his confirmation. He also signed a second order narrowing an earlier arrangement under which the IRS had agreed not to reopen the president’s past tax returns.

The move ends a standoff that has blocked Blanche’s nomination since June and nearly derailed a must-pass budget bill. The question now is whether the Senate will do what the written orders were designed to make possible.

The fund that would not die

The anti-weaponization fund was born of a settlement between Trump and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump withdrew a $10 billion suit against the tax agency, and in exchange the Justice Department set up a $1.8 billion pool to compensate people who claim the government targeted them politically. The name said it all: money for Americans who say the federal machine came after them.

Senate Republicans never liked it. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas pressed Blanche on whether violent criminals would be eligible for the payouts, and the fund nearly sank a budget reconciliation bill last month. Blanche said he would walk it back, Trump declared it dead, and then, in a reversal reported over the weekend, the president appeared to revive it as leverage: approve his lawyer, or the payouts come back.

Sunday’s orders are the counter-move. By formally rescinding the fund in writing, Blanche gave Tillis and Cornyn what they had been demanding, and the signal from both senators’ camps was that the nomination could now move. The second order, clarifying the scope of the IRS arrangement, addressed the other objection that had made senators uneasy.

What the orders actually say

Blanche posted both orders on X on Sunday night. The first rescinds the establishment of the anti-weaponization fund, the nearly $1.8 billion pool. The second sharpens the language of the agreement that kept the IRS from reopening the president’s earlier returns.

The details matter less than the sequence. Blanche’s posts came after weeks of negotiations with the senators who were blocking him, and they were read in Washington as confirmation that he had secured the approval of Cornyn and Tillis, the two key holdouts. The Judiciary Committee is expected to take up his nomination again, and the path to a floor vote now looks clear.

The pattern behind the standoff

There is a larger story here than one confirmation fight. The fund was created by a settlement between a president and his own tax agency, administered by the department his lawyer is nominated to lead, and paid out to people who claim the government abused them. It became a bargaining chip in a fight between the president and his own party’s senators. It was named against weaponization, and it was used as a weapon.

Blanche’s own position is equally tangled. He is Trump’s former personal lawyer, the man who defended the president in court, now seeking to run the department that once prosecuted him. He has run the Justice Department since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi, and he has been acting in the job while the Senate debated whether to give it to him permanently.

The rescission removes the immediate obstacle. It does not remove the questions the standoff raised: whether the department’s top job should go to the president’s defense attorney, and whether a fund created to compensate the victims of government abuse should have been used as leverage in the first place. Those questions do not die with the fund. They move to the confirmation hearing, and then to the job itself.

The fund that would not die

What the orders actually say

The pattern behind the standoff

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