In November 2023, Democrats swept open races for the Central Bucks County School District in Pennsylvania. The election reversed control of the school board, which had previously been controlled by deeply conservative members who ran on fears of indoctrination in education. That group banned political expression in the schools, including mentioning social causes, and faced lawsuits over discrimination against LGBTQ+ students. Voters had had enough and they were ousted. But in their last meeting before leaving office, those school board members voted in favor of two items: a new policy banning transgender athletes from being on teams that fit their gender identity and a large severance package for Superintendent Abram Lucabaugh. They approved a payout of more than $700,000 for Lucabaugh, a conservative ally who already got a major raise earlier that year.
The incident is instructive, not just because it is a moment of reactionaries proving to be so unpopular in governance that they get kicked out, but also because it shows the other side of the modern right project. It's an exercise in plundering the public commons. It’s not at odds with the culture war side of that project, it’s a complementary pillar.
The Bucks County payout feels like a prelude to this past week's national news. On Monday, the Department of Justice confirmed it is setting up a $1.776 billion fund to pay those "who suffered weaponization and lawfare" from the government. The fund comes after President Donald Trump had sued the IRS for $10 billion in damages over a matter where an IRS contractor leaked Trump's and others' tax returns. The former contractor was charged, pleaded guilty and got sentenced all during the Biden administration. Trump, two of his sons, and the family's Trump Organization still sued in January.
The suit itself is wild, given that Trump is president, the acting attorney general was his personal defense attorney right up until Trump began his second term, and Trump has already engaged in actions that have personally enriched him in the last 16 months. Crypto trades, cushy contracts for allies, lucrative stock trades, and more. But this is different, it is specifically a payout to him and his allies from the state, orchestrated by him, and paid by taxpayers. It’s rightly being called a slush fund. It’s extraction of the public commons. It's a very open extraction, with no attempt to hide it.
News outlets have called this a deal or a settlement or other terms that have a veneer of formality and procedure to it all. There is no judge overseeing this. As Patrick Redford at Defector noted, the judge handling Trump's suit had outright ordered the parties to say whether or not they were in on this together for plunder. In fact, the way this is being rolled out, and the way the Acting Attorney General talked about it while in a Congressional hearing on Tuesday, shows that this is going out of its way to avoid any sort of scrutiny.
The full text of the Justice Department's order and the related press release are alarming in both their content and conspiratorial and revisionist wording (Mike Masnick at Tech Dirt did a good job breaking it down) but some details stand out. The $1.776 billion fund will be overseen by a panel of five, chosen by the Attorney General, with only one person appointed with “Congressional consultation.” Oh, and Trump can remove any member he wants. And the "Anti-Weaponization Fund" stops processing claims in December 2028, so this can only exist during the second Trump administration.
The new $1.776 billion — get it? — fund and its board will “provide a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The vague way that’s all written raises a few questions: By that phrasing, doesn’t Donald Trump count as someone who could get money from this? That probably doesn’t mean antifascist protesters from the DisruptJ20 protest of 2017 or civil rights groups or anyone like that, right? Is it bad that the fund will be overseen by a panel appointed by someone who had been Trump's personal attorney before joining the Justice Department? Is it shady that there is no oversight for the money once it is deposited, beyond saying who got it? And the answer to all of those is yes.
Right now it’s not certain where the money will go. It’s almost guaranteed that some participants of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol to overturn the 2020 election will get some amount of money (even though a great deal of them are already wealthy). But that could be a small fraction and instead cronies, friends or even just Trump by himself could pocket most of the fund. But that money is going to be moved over the next three years.
Big payouts and powerful benefactors are not new to the American right; see years of Citizens United-enabled dark money, people getting lucrative cuts through policies or defense contracts or even the money line from your friendly neighborhood now-ousted Hungarian right-wing leader. It is the direct nature of this, of the head of state and the state collaborating for such a thing that is unique.
None of this is subterfuge, it’s not something to distract people from something being done in secret — well okay, maybe the UFO release was. The modern project being carried out by the right, be it in Argentina, in Bucks County or in D.C. is a two-pronged one: reshape society and extract from the public for the private. Money that is paid into the system for services: daily school operations, teachers salaries, or in this case Veterans Affairs benefits, weather forecasts, the military-industrial complex and food inspectors. The Central Bucks County School District case stands out because it laid bare the project. The ousted board members had nothing to lose so why not pull from public funds one last time? Consider the new slush fund just the latest example of that same idea.