Blanche rescinds Trump fund to secure GOP support for confirmation

Todd Blanche formally rescinded Donald Trump’s roughly $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund late Sunday, removing the obstacle that had kept Republican Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina from backing his attorney general nomination. The move came after both senators said they would not advance Blanche unless they received written assurances that the fund would be scrapped.

The deal exposed how much leverage a small bloc of Senate Republicans still held over a Trump loyalist fighting for confirmation. The Senate Judiciary Committee had already postponed its scheduled Thursday vote, and Chuck Grassley’s office said a key GOP vote was still waiting for documentation tied to Trump’s IRS settlement. Blanche met with Cornyn and Tillis Thursday afternoon as the nomination fight intensified, after Trump floated temporarily withdrawing Blanche’s nomination amid the backlash.

The fight grew out of a Trump-Justice Department settlement reached in May 2026 that would have set aside money for people Trump considered unfairly targeted. Critics said the arrangement could have functioned as a payoff for political allies and complicated tax scrutiny, especially because the money was linked to claims involving Trump and the IRS. Reuters reported on July 31 that Trump publicly defended the fund and said it was “dead,” even as the administration came under mounting pressure to abandon it.

Once Blanche issued the formal order ending the fund, the two holdouts said they would back him, clearing the immediate path for the Judiciary Committee to move forward with a vote expected Tuesday. The episode turned a routine attorney general confirmation into a test of whether Republican senators would challenge a Trump nominee over the use of executive branch power, Justice Department independence and the optics of steering taxpayer-linked money toward allies.

It also showed that confirmation politics in the Trump era could hinge less on ideology than on transactional concessions. Cornyn and Tillis did not win a policy revision or a staffing promise; they extracted the elimination of the fund itself, and that narrow but costly concession was enough to unlock Blanche’s path.