Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche this week signed an order rescinding the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a deal struck with Republican holdouts Sen. John Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis to secure their support for his confirmation. The fund, created as part of a settlement in President Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns, was meant to compensate people who said they’d been unfairly targeted by weaponized government agencies.
Blanche’s order states plainly that the fund “is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” The move was widely covered as a win for fiscal hawks in the Senate and a concession from an administration trying to clear a path to confirmation.
But tax policy analysts covering the same settlement have pointed to a different, less-covered piece of it that remains fully intact: a sweeping tax audit immunity provision covering President Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization. That immunity was part of the original settlement, struck when Trump dropped a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, and it was never on the table in Blanche’s negotiations with Cornyn and Tillis. A Forbes tax analysis of the deal was blunt about the trade: rescinding a fund that had never actually paid out any money while leaving the audit shield in place is, in the piece’s words, “no concession at all.”
The distinction matters because the two provisions carry very different weight. The $1.8 billion fund drew nearly all of the public and Senate scrutiny, in part because “slush fund” is an easy target. The audit immunity, by contrast, is a standing legal shield against IRS scrutiny of the Trump family’s finances, reportedly significant enough that tax researchers have estimated it could erase more than $100 million in potential IRS claims. Neither Blanche’s office nor the senators who negotiated the fund’s rescission have proposed revisiting that immunity.
For now, the fund is gone and the audit shield stands. Whether the Senate holdouts secured a meaningful concession or a symbolic one depends on which of those two provisions you think actually mattered.
