Lawmakers from both parties moved Tuesday to block President Donald Trump’s settlement with himself, a clash that put a federal judge and a $1.776 billion taxpayer payout at the center of a growing Capitol Hill fight. The money, according to the administration’s plan, would go to people the president’s appointees deemed to have been targeted by the government.
Republican Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania said the deal was wrong “on multiple fronts, morally and legally,” and argued that the executive branch cannot spend money on its own. Democrat Tom Suozzi said the setup pushed the issue to an absurd extreme, saying the federal government can pay settlements in routine cases but that Trump wanted $1.8 billion and wanted his people to hand it out. Suozzi said the logic would let the money flow to people he believed had been wronged by the government, including people involved in the January 6 insurrection.
The dispute traces back to a lawsuit in which the president of the United States sued the United States over the leak of his tax returns. Last week, he settled with the federal government. Now lawmakers are trying to stop the Justice Department from giving Trump $1.776 billion in taxpayer money, a figure that has turned an already unusual case into something far larger than a private compensation claim.
Fitzpatrick, who like Suozzi is a member of the Problem Solvers Caucus, framed the issue as one of constitutional power. “The executive branch does not have any money in their own right,” he said, arguing that every dollar must be appropriated by Congress. Suozzi, speaking from his own experience on January 6, said the administration’s rationale becomes hard to defend when the possible beneficiaries include people prosecuted for attacking the Capitol. He said Daniel Rodriguez took a taser and stuck it in a police officer’s neck, leaving the officer with a heart attack and traumatic brain injury, and that Rodriguez was later sentenced to 12 years in prison before Trump pardoned him along with hundreds of others.
The White House has said it is not necessarily giving money to January 6 rioters, but it has also said it is not ruling out that possibility. Suozzi said that leaves the plan dangerously open-ended. “It’s absurd that they could now try and apply to the federal government for money,” he said.
That is the core of the fight now: a settlement born from a tax-return leak case has become a test of whether a judge, Congress, and the administration can be pulled into the same dispute over who gets paid, who decides, and whether the federal treasury can be used to reward people the White House says were targeted. The answer, at least for now, is that lawmakers of both parties are trying to shut it down before the first check is written.
