A dozen Senate Republicans tried, and failed, to permanently shut down President Donald Trump's nearly $2 billion fund tied to a settlement between the Trump family and the Internal Revenue Service. The amendment, offered by Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, would have prevented the fund from ever returning and redirected the money to the nation's fraud fund. It went nowhere.
Republicans and Democrats joined forces to defeat the Tillis amendment during the Senate's marathon voting spree to pass the GOP's nearly $70 billion immigration enforcement package, Fox News reported. The result may effectively end the growing push on Capitol Hill to codify a permanent prohibition on the fund.
The fund, sometimes called the "anti-weaponization" fund, was announced last month as part of a settlement between the Trump family and the IRS. It immediately drew bipartisan fire. Republicans feared that people convicted of assaulting police officers during the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot could access taxpayer dollars through the fund. Democrats, for their part, opposed the fund on different grounds but largely refused to back Tillis's plan to divert the money.
Tillis framed his amendment as a common-sense move. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had already vowed that the administration would no longer pursue the fund. Both the White House and the Department of Justice signaled they were not moving forward with it. Tillis argued that if the administration itself wanted the fund dead, Congress should make it official.
Fox News reported Tillis telling colleagues:
"Why not use this moment to codify that? Otherwise, you're exposing every one of our members who are in cycle to having to deal with this between today and Election Day. And that makes no sense for something that the White House says they're not moving forward, or the DOJ says they're not moving forward."
The logic was straightforward. If the fund is truly abandoned, write it into law so no future administration, or this one, can revive it. Tillis warned that leaving the door open would create a political headache for Republican senators facing voters in the next election cycle.
But only a dozen Republicans agreed. The rest sided against the amendment, and Democrats, who Fox News said "despise" the fund, also largely voted it down. For Democrats, diverting the money to a fraud fund was evidently a step too far, even if they shared Tillis's opposition to the fund itself.
Part of the difficulty for Tillis was that the president himself sent contradictory signals. Asked in the Oval Office on Wednesday about the fund's fate, Trump offered no clarity:
"I'd have to ask the lawyers. I don't know."
Moments later, he struck a different tone entirely:
"The weaponization fund, as far as I'm concerned, was a beautiful thing. I love it. I think it's so important."
That put Tillis in a difficult spot. The North Carolina senator noted that the president's comments ran "to the contrary" of what the administration's own officials had been saying. Blanche had vowed the fund was dead. Trump sounded like he wished it weren't.
For Republican senators weighing a vote, the gap between the president's personal enthusiasm and his administration's official position created genuine uncertainty. A lawmaker voting to kill the fund could find himself crosswise with a president who just praised it on camera.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, took a different approach. On Thursday, Cassidy signed onto an amicus brief with Democratic Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey opposing the fund. Fox News described the brief as "blasting" the fund, though the filing's exact text was not published.
Cassidy also has his own amendment aimed at ensuring the fund "won't return," though details of that proposal remain unclear. Whether Cassidy's amendment gets a vote, and whether it fares any better than Tillis's, is an open question now that the Senate has moved past the marathon session on the immigration enforcement package.
On the other side of the intra-party debate, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky argued against acting preemptively. Paul's position: deal with the fund if and when the president actually tries to revive it.
"People say, 'But, oh, Trump may someday again do the weaponization fund from his remarks yesterday.' Well, then address it if he tries to do it, if it's unpopular. People can address it when it happens."
Paul's argument has a certain conservative appeal, don't legislate against hypotheticals. But it also leaves the nearly $2 billion question unresolved. The fund exists. The settlement created it. The administration says it won't pursue it, but the president says he loves it. And Congress just declined to settle the matter in statute.
The amendment's failure reveals a familiar dynamic in the Republican conference. On one side, a group of pragmatic members, Tillis, Cassidy, and their allies, wanted to close a political vulnerability before it became a campaign liability. On the other, a larger bloc preferred to trust the administration's assurances and avoid a public break with the president over a fund he had just praised.
Democrats, meanwhile, managed to oppose the fund in principle while refusing to help redirect the money. Their opposition to the Tillis amendment meant the fund's critics were split across party lines but couldn't assemble a majority for any single remedy.
The specific Republicans who voted with Tillis were not identified beyond the count of a dozen. The final vote tally was not disclosed. Those gaps make it harder to assess whether the amendment came close or was defeated handily.
Tillis also signaled broader willingness to challenge spending priorities within his own party. Fox News reported that the senator told colleagues he would not support the upcoming budget reconciliation package if it included $1 billion for what was described as "President Donald Trump's ballroom." That threat suggests Tillis is prepared to be a persistent thorn on fiscal questions, regardless of whether the White House appreciates the scrutiny.
For now, the nearly $2 billion fund remains in a kind of political limbo. The administration says it won't use it. The president says he loves it. Congress voted against permanently ending it. And Cassidy's separate amendment is still waiting in the wings.
The practical result is that a fund born from a settlement between the Trump family and the IRS, a fund that alarmed members of both parties, survives without clear guardrails, without a definitive congressional prohibition, and without a consistent message from the executive branch about whether it is alive or dead.
Republicans who feared the fund could become a taxpayer-funded payout for January 6 defendants convicted of assaulting police officers got no resolution. The concern remains. The fund remains. And the next fight over it is just a news cycle away.
When the White House says one thing and the president says another, Congress has every reason to put the answer in writing. Instead, the Senate punted, and left taxpayers holding a nearly $2 billion question mark.
