A federal judge in Alexandria has refused to dismiss as moot a challenge to a proposed $1.8 billion compensation mechanism described by critics as an “anti-weaponization fund,” keeping alive a closely watched dispute over executive power, appropriations, and the legal limits of government settlement structures.

The plaintiffs, including Democracy Forward, had challenged the concept as an effort to channel large-scale payouts tied to claims by Trump political allies through an executive-branch mechanism rather than through a clearer congressional appropriations process.

A federal judge has closed President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury, but not without raising pointed questions about how the case ended and whether it ever presented a conventional adversarial dispute.