Trump’s Slush Fund Is Dead For Now, Let’s Bar It For Good

The President of the United States sued the government he runs and crafted a settlement with agency heads he can fire to give him $1.7 billion of our money he can use to reward his allies and foot soldiers. And all while he’s telling us we can’t afford food assistance or cheaper health care! This is open corruption, a president using taxpayer funds as a personal piggy bank. This is money going from hard-working Americans to enrich the thugs who beat law enforcement with flagpoles and fire extinguishers to try to overturn an election. Pay-offs would be doled out by a commission with zero transparency requirements, whose members would be appointed by Trump’s own attorney general and could be removed by him at will. If we saw this in another country, we know exactly what we’d call it. Under bipartisan pressure, the White House is claiming it will not move forward with this slush fund. But given the sheer contempt for ethics and the public it took to propose these bribes in the first place, it would be embarrassingly naïve to take their word for it. Congress must seize this moment and pass a measure to permanently block the use of a single penny for these payoffs, putting an end to this theft from the taxpayer for good. Please start by supporting an amendment to the budget reconciliation bill with this goal.