There is a question cutting across party lines in the spring of 2026, one that constitutional scholars, legal experts, and ordinary citizens are asking with growing urgency: who, exactly, is watching the watchmen?
The machinery of American democracy was designed around a single animating principle. No one person, no single branch of government, and no political faction should hold unchecked power.
The Founders were not naive idealists. They were students of history who had watched republics collapse, and they built a system of guardrails because they understood that power, left uncontrolled, does not police itself. Checks and balances were not a courtesy feature of the Constitution. They were its load-bearing walls.
Those walls are being tested right now. The question is not whether Americans of good faith can see it. The question is whether Congress has the will to do anything about it.
A Settlement Unlike Any in American History
On May 19, 2026, the Department of Justice announced a settlement in President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, an agency his own administration controls.
The president, who filed suit in January 2026 alongside his two adult sons and the Trump Organization, agreed to drop the lawsuit. In exchange, the Justice Department, led by his own attorney general, established a $1.776 billion fund called the Anti-Weaponization Fund, funded entirely by federal taxpayer money.
Even the president acknowledged the unusual nature of what was happening. In an Oval Office appearance before the settlement was finalized, Trump said: “I’m sort of suing myself. I don’t know, how do you settle the lawsuit? I’ll say, give me X dollars, and I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit. It looks bad, I’m suing myself, right?”
That admission captures the structural problem at the heart of this arrangement better than any legal brief could.
This arrangement should trouble anyone who cares about how power is exercised in Washington, regardless of party.
A sitting president sued a federal agency he oversees. His own Justice Department negotiated the settlement on behalf of that same agency. The resulting agreement directs $1.776 billion in taxpayer funds into a compensation pool that will benefit, among others, people pardoned for their roles in the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack. A five-member commission appointed by the attorney general will decide who gets paid.
The president and his family received a formal apology but no direct cash. The president also dropped two additional civil claims totaling $230 million related to the 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate and the Russia investigation from his first term. The fund runs until December 15, 2028, approximately one month before the second term ends, with quarterly reports required but significant discretion left to the commission on how claims are evaluated.
A separate one-page filing, quietly published the following day, revealed a provision that received less attention than it deserved: the IRS is now “forever barred and precluded” from pursuing any examinations, audits, or claims related to the president and his family connected to the leaked returns.
Legal experts across the ideological spectrum agreed on one point: nothing like this has ever happened before. “I am unaware of any other president suing the IRS in the manner that Trump has chosen to do,” Tax Notes contributing editor Joseph Thorndike told CNN. Ed Whelan, a conservative attorney at the Ethics and Public Policy Center writing in National Review, noted that the lawsuit cited IRS conduct from May 2019 through September 2020, a period when the president’s own first-term appointees were running the agency.
The Lawfare Institute described the settlement as “one of the most breathtakingly unusual episodes of the second term.” A federal judge overseeing the case noted she had been “stripped of jurisdiction” to review or challenge the arrangement at all.
The Argument for It, and Why It Falls Short
The administration points to past uses of the federal Judgment Fund, including an Obama-era settlement for Native American farmers known as the Keepseagle case, as precedent. That comparison deserves honest examination rather than dismissal.
The underlying grievance has real merit. A government contractor, Charles Littlejohn, did illegally access and leak the private tax returns of the president and thousands of other Americans. He was prosecuted and convicted. A real wrong occurred, and those harmed by government misconduct are entitled to seek redress.
But the Keepseagle settlement involved outside plaintiffs, ordinary citizens suing a government that had wronged them, with the Justice Department representing the government’s interests against theirs.
The structure was adversarial, as our legal system requires. What happened here was categorically different. The president was simultaneously the plaintiff, the head of the defendant agency, and the authority whose appointees negotiated the settlement. There was no adversarial check. The government sued itself and then paid itself to make the lawsuit disappear, using a mechanism that bypassed the congressional appropriations process entirely.
That is not precedent. That is a different category of action altogether.
What Checks and Balances Are Actually For
The Founders were specific about why they separated powers. James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51 that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The entire architecture of the Constitution assumes that those who hold power will be tempted to expand it, and that the only reliable check on that temptation is institutional structure, not individual virtue.
Congress holds the power of the purse for exactly this reason. When nearly $1.8 billion in public funds moves through a legal settlement rather than the normal appropriations process, it does not bypass a procedural formality.
It bypasses the branch of government responsible for authorizing the spending of public money. Whether that bypass was technically legal is a separate question from whether it is the kind of precedent a healthy republic should allow to stand unchallenged.
Both parties have an urgent interest here, whether or not they recognize it yet. What one administration normalizes, the next will inherit and expand.
A Democratic president with a sympathetic attorney general could use this same playbook to direct nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds toward causes of her choosing, entirely outside the appropriations process, simply by filing a creative lawsuit against an agency she controls. The Republicans who are quiet about this settlement today would not be quiet about that one. The principle cuts both ways, which is precisely why it matters.
What Congress Must Do Now
This is not a call for partisan investigations or performative hearings designed to generate campaign clips. It is a call for the serious, bicameral oversight that the Constitution assigns to Congress and that the American public deserves.
Members of Congress from both parties should immediately convene hearings on this settlement. Those hearings should examine how the Anti-Weaponization Fund will operate, who serves on the commission and under what standards, what transparency mechanisms exist, and whether adequate separation between the president and the claims process can be guaranteed.
The commission serves at the pleasure of an attorney general who serves at the pleasure of the president. That is not independence. It is the appearance of it.
Stricter rules are needed around the Judgment Fund to prevent its use for broad political compensation programs. Clearer boundaries should govern when a sitting president may bring personal litigation against agencies under his own control. Transparency requirements for settlements of this magnitude must be tightened, with mandatory congressional notification and a review window before funds are disbursed.
The Prevent Presidential Profiteering Act, introduced in the House, and the Stop Presidential Embezzlement Act, introduced in the Senate, both address elements of this problem. Whether one agrees with the framing of those bills or not, the concern they reflect is legitimate and deserves a serious bipartisan response rather than a party-line dismissal.
What Citizens Can Do Right Now
Institutions do not reform themselves. They respond to sustained public pressure, and the most direct form of that pressure is constituent contact with elected representatives.
Reaching out to senators and members of Congress, particularly those in the majority who hold the committee gavels and subpoena power, matters. The message does not need to be partisan. It can be simple and direct: we want hearings on this settlement, we want transparency on how this fund operates, and we expect Congress to exercise its constitutional authority regardless of which party benefits.
Supporting nonpartisan watchdog groups challenging this arrangement in court is another concrete step. The Emoluments Clause arguments raised by members of Congress in their amicus brief may or may not prevail, but the legal process requires participants to function.
Groups like the Brennan Center for Justice, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Project on Government Oversight work across partisan lines on exactly these structural questions.
Staying informed and demanding specificity from media coverage matters equally. The details of how this fund operates, who gets paid, and under what standards are not procedural fine print. They are the substance of the accountability question.
The Moment We Are In
The American constitutional system has survived genuine crises before, a Civil War, two World Wars, a presidential resignation, and moments of institutional failure that seemed potentially fatal to the republic. It survived those moments not because the system was self-correcting, but because enough citizens and legislators chose, at decisive moments, to defend the structure over the short-term advantage of their faction.
We are in one of those moments now. The IRS settlement is not simply a policy dispute about compensating alleged victims of government overreach. It is a test of whether the branch of government designed to check executive power is willing to exercise that power when doing so requires crossing a political line.
The checks and balances written into the Constitution do not enforce themselves. They are enforced by people, by legislators willing to demand oversight, by citizens willing to insist on it, and by a press willing to report it with the seriousness it deserves.
The question posed in this title is not rhetorical. It is a direct challenge to the men and women serving in Congress right now, on both sides of the aisle, who took an oath to the Constitution and not to any president, party, or political moment.
When will the checks and balances begin to check and balance?
The answer depends entirely on whether enough of us decide that the question is worth insisting upon.
