WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is overhauling how the federal government addresses homelessness, tying billions of dollars in Housing and Urban Development funding to treatment, recovery, and measurable outcomes rather than approaches officials say have enabled addiction and failed to solve the problem. The Housing and Urban Development Department announced a new $4.04 billion Notice of Funding Opportunity on Monday through its Continuum of Care (CoC) homelessness assistance program. “The status quo on homelessness is not working,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said on a call with reporters. “In a country as prosperous as ours, it is unacceptable that hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans are sleeping on the streets, struggling with drug addiction, suffering from mental illness, and trapped in cycles that federal policy has too often failed to address.”  The funding notice represents what Turner called a “fundamental shift” in how HUD evaluates homeless programs and allocates federal dollars. “Instead of enablement, we will focus on treatment and recovery,” he said. “We will fund projects based on merit and outcomes, not warehousing the homeless and government dependent. We will define success by how many Americans achieve self-sufficiency, not by dollars spent or units filled.”  HUD officials stressed that under President Joe Biden’s administration, billions of dollars were spent on the homelessness problem, yet homelessness simultaneously spiked. One reason for this, the officials told reporters, is that HUD was funding programs that were enabling the use of illicit drugs and distribution of paraphernalia.  “We should be making this easy to get treatment and hard to get high, but our policies in the prior Biden and Obama administrations have basically made it easy to get high and hard to get treatment,” a HUD official explained to The Daily Wire. HUD’s 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report informed Congress that 745,652 people in the United States were homeless, including 266,320 people living on the street on a single night in January 2025. The figure is a 3% decrease since 2024, which the Trump administration has attributed to decreases in homelessness in sanctuary cities. Between 2013 and 2025, homelessness increased 27%, unsheltered homelessness by 36%, chronic homelessness climbed 81%, and taxpayer-funded beds increased by 151%. Continuum of Care spending had also increased 111%, according to HUD. Officials stressed that those trends demonstrate the need for a new approach. Under the revised framework, HUD says it will prioritize programs that produce measurable improvements in treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency rather than simply increasing the number of beds or housing units. Officials also accused some federally funded homelessness providers of tolerating or facilitating drug use. “Under the Biden administration, HUD turned a blind eye to and ignored the reality of illicit drug use and trafficking inside of DOC funded, HUD funded housing for the homeless, and the result is devastating,” one HUD official explained to The Daily Wire.  “We’ve seen countless lives lost to overdose inside of HUD funded housing for the homeless because of this, and even worse, we’ve also seen COC funded providers distributing needles, crack pipes, foil, drug paraphernalia to use deadly drugs inside of housing.” Officials also pointed to the federal “Crack House Law,” slang for the Controlled Substances Act, which makes it illegal to knowingly open or run a place that is being used for drug manufacturing or distribution. “We basically had programs totally ignoring the federal law, as well as local and state laws,” explained a second HUD official, “and what you’re seeing is a lot of mayors are really leading the effort now to fight back in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Austin, Houston, Portland.” “Somebody experiencing homelessness should not get a get out of jail card for distribution use, on the street,” the official added. 

Former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters is a free woman after being released from a Colorado correctional facility on Monday, ending a dark chapter of weaponized, partisan governance in the Centennial State. Her release comes after Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis succumbed to relentless pressure from the White House, ultimately commuting her absurdly punitive sentence. Peters, 70, had served less than a quarter of her original nine-year sentence before Polis formally intervened. While left-wing commentators and activist state officials are busy wringing their hands over her release, the truth that the mainstream media wants to ignore is that Peters’ original punishment was never about blind justice. It was a politically motivated hit job designed to make an example out of a grandmother who dared to ask questions about the 2020 election. Even the Colorado Court of Appeals — hardly a bastion of conservative thought — was forced to admit earlier this year that the trial court went way over the line. In April, a three-judge appellate panel completely threw out Peters’ original nine-year sentence. Why? Because the trial judge, Matthew Barrett, let his partisan TDS show, using his bench to launch a blistering, vindictive tirade against Peters. Barrett openly mocked her as a “charlatan” and a “snake-oil saleswoman,” making it glaringly obvious that he wasn’t punishing her actions, but rather her First Amendment-protected speech and skepticism regarding Dominion Voting Systems.   The appellate court rightly noted that the trial court’s nasty rhetoric went far beyond relevant considerations, effectively exposing that the lengthy prison term was a direct punishment for her refusal to bow to the establishment’s narrative. Governor Polis, facing a masterclass in political pressure from the Trump administration — which included relocating U.S. Space Command out of Colorado and slashing federal grants — finally saw the writing on the wall. When Polis issued the commutation, he openly admitted that the nine-year sentence handed down to a first-time, non-violent offender was an “obvious outlier” and “unusually harsh.” He even pointed out the blatant double standard in his state, comparing Peters’ draconian treatment to the slap-on-the-wrist probation given to former Democratic State Senator Sonya Jaquez Lewis for similar charges of attempting to influence a public servant. Predictably, the partisan Democrats who weaponized the state’s legal system against Peters are throwing a tantrum. Far-left Secretary of State Jena Griswold — the same activist who tried to kick Donald Trump off the Colorado ballot — released a statement claiming Peters’ release would “embolden the election denier movement.” But the facts speak for themselves. Tina Peters was a 70-year-old public servant with no prior record, thrown into a maximum-security prison for trying to preserve election data. The establishment wanted her broken. Instead, the system’s overreach was exposed, proving once and for all that her nine-year sentence was nothing more than a vindictive, tyrannical abuse of power.

Fifteen cameras. Two German Shepherds. Three legal guns. That’s not a man preparing for the apocalypse. That’s a Tuesday afternoon in Los Angeles. Doug Ellin, the creator of Entourage — the show that made L.A. look like the greatest party on Earth, that made a generation of young men throw their belongings in a truck and chase the dream West — had his home invaded by masked intruders. His response wasn’t a therapy session or a sternly worded letter to his city councilman. It was a small arsenal, a viral meltdown, and the kind of raw honesty that makes comfortable people deeply uncomfortable. “I meet people all the time that moved here because of the show that I f*cking created,” Ellin said, “and they hate it here now. HATE.” He’s not talking about traffic. He’s not talking about high rent. He’s talking about the specific, suffocating dread of a city that has turned on its own people. Picture the L.A. Ellin once sold to the world: rooftop pools, warm nights, the electric possibility that the next party could change your life. Now picture the Los Angeles his neighbors actually inhabit: floodlights burning at 3 AM, Ring cameras covering every blind spot, security guards on rotating shifts because the police — defunded, demoralized, and politically neutered — aren’t coming fast enough. Or at all. “Everyone in my neighborhood has got the same problem: they’re f*cking all putting cameras and high-end security guards because we’re all getting broken into,” Ellin said. “This city has collapsed in the last 5 years. There is no f*cking denying it unless you have an agenda.” Unfortunately, they all do. This is the agenda: remain as politically braindead as the heroin addicts terrorizing the city, vote blue until they’re bluer in the face than the zombie coke heads sleeping next to the ballot boxes, and endure the deteriorating quality of life in the name of social justice and pro-socialist “lesser evil” voting. To discover where that agenda leads to, try walking down streets that once hosted Oscar parties. The tent cities stretch for blocks. Fentanyl zombies sway at intersections while dashcam footage of daylight smash-and-grabs floods social media. Film production, the oxygen of L.A.’s economy, the industry that built the dream, has ditched the city of angels and moved to Georgia and New Zealand. The lots are quieter. The crews are gone. Six to seven people overdose and die in Los Angeles every single day. This isn’t a war zone. This isn’t a developing nation. This is the city with the most expensive real estate on the continent. A city whose mayor just spent billions to solve homelessness and produced nothing but a $1 billion deficit and a metastasizing crisis. Karen Bass, the incumbent mayor, promised to end those very street encampments. She failed. Then, she presided over the most destructive wildfire in the city’s history. She opposed housing bills. She oversaw an exodus of film production that gutted the middle class of her own creative economy. She claims crime is down. It’s not. The reporting of crime is down because victims don’t bother calling a defunded police force, and because officers are quietly pressured to reclassify felonies into misdemeanors. The LA Times recently ran the headline: “L.A. is safer than it’s been in decades.” Doug Ellin read that from behind his 16th security camera. The paper of record and the people on the ground are living in different cities. Only one of them is real. But journalists, politicians, and their eager ballot beavers can’t run on ideas and empty promises forever. Eventually reality catches up, far later than it does for the citizens they’ve already hurt, but eventually nonetheless. Take Nithya Raman, the socialist third-wheel of this race. She spent years cheerfully telling other people, smaller people, less connected people, that homeless encampments within 10 feet of their child’s school were perfectly acceptable. The progressive vanguard demands sacrifice, and she was very comfortable demanding it from everyone but herself. Until the encampments moved near her two-million-dollar gated home and her children. Then, suddenly, she found the concept of proximity unacceptable. The word for this is cowardice. The political word for it is Democrat. Doug Ellin was perfectly willing to bypass President Donald Trump and vote for the soft-on-crime candidate until his home was robbed. Now he has two frightening watchdogs, security cameras out the wazoo, and a shotgun at the ready. Apparently, all it takes is a masked intruder, a drug zombie in the front yard, a slap in the face by reality, and one good dose of common sense to wake people up to the horrors of progressive policy. Otherwise, they sit idly behind the fences of their compounds, quite content to let the city rot around them. Unfortunately, Spencer Pratt still has an uphill battle ahead of him. Though he’s simply promising cleaner streets, safer neighborhoods, and a better quality of life, L.A. progressives aren’t smart enough to see through the fog of woke war. When asked simple questions about Bass’s basura (trash) policies, they go mute, but she is black! So … #blackpride, according to this young woman. The same way people are ardent supporters of Graham Platner, the Nazi tattoo guy, Zohran Mamdani, the terror-sympathizer, and Bernie Sanders, the useless leech on the (B)ass of society, they will show up for Karen Bass, a Marxist-style leader who will undoubtedly Make LA Worse Forevermore. The Left isn’t voting for a person or a policy. They’re voting for whoever imbibes from the grievance well, ignorantly abides by collectivist ideology, and cozies up to the soft Marxism that has made every city it touches worse. And they can do so while living behind gates and op-ed pages. But for most Angelenos, the Entourage reality no longer exists in the City of Demons. Tuesday will be telling. Los Angeles will discover whether it wants to change that or is content to watch the dream it once sold to the world collapse, one camera at a time.

One of my favorite Americans, who happened to be born before America was a country, is Daniel Boone. Two years after America’s birth as a nation, Boone was in captivity, having been taken prisoner by a Shawnee war party. He was imprisoned for months before making a daring escape, and then traveling 160 miles through uncharted wilderness, on foot and by horse in just five days. He made it back to his settlement in just enough time to warn them of a coming attack.  That story alone could be its own movie — and there should be dozens of movies about Daniel Boone. Instead, there have been basically none, at least since the 1960s. But that story is just one anecdote from an absolutely amazing, mythic and yet also real American life. Boone spent decades exploring and charting the wild American frontier. He helped trailblaze the wilderness road through the Appalachian Mountains, which paved the way for settlers to reach Kentucky and opened a doorway to the West. Just 15 miles from their final destination on the Kentucky River, Boone’s party was attacked by Shawnee warriors. Two men were killed. This echoed an incident from two years before, when Cherokees attacked Boone as he tried to make his way into Kentucky. Several of his party were killed, including his son. And yet two years later here he was again. And this time he completed the task. But, again, this was just one chapter in an amazing American life.  These are the kinds of stories we should be talking about in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday. We have a lot to celebrate and be thankful for. We are a nation built by some of the most extraordinary human beings who ever lived on the planet. And yet, as you may have noticed, America 250 has so far been a rather muted, anticlimactic affair. There is very little national excitement for it. Very little is being done to commemorate it. And the few meager attempts to organize events around America 250 have been confused, disorganized, and frankly embarrassing, all the more so because it was not supposed to be like this.  Less than two years ago — if you can remember back that far — Donald Trump won the popular vote over Kamala Harris by several million votes. To the liberal mind — to every true believer in the self-described “party of democracy” — this result wasn’t simply shocking. It was unthinkable. These are people who firmly believed, to their core, that the Electoral College was the only reason for the existence of the Republican Party. In truth, Kamala Harris’ defeat wasn’t difficult to explain. It turns out that no sane American wants to be told every day, for years on end, that America is a terrible country. Americans don’t want endless racial grievances to dictate public policy. We don’t want open borders to destroy our national identity, any more than we want deranged activists to smear America’s founders and tear down their statues.  By electing Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, more than 77 million voters rejected a political ideology that’s premised on cynicism and disdain for America and its people, particularly white males. Instead, we voted for the candidate who explicitly promised that he would celebrate America’s greatness and, in particular, its history. This video is from the summer of 2023, as the Biden administration ramped up its campaign of political prosecutions against Trump and his allies. At the time, to many Americans, the idea that Trump could win re-election seemed hard to comprehend. With that in mind, here was Trump’s message. Watch: Memorial Day 2025 has come and gone, and as you’ve probably noticed, the nationwide parades have not begun. Instead, the administration’s plan to honor the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the birth of this country, by any measure, has fallen apart in spectacular fashion.  And I’ll freely admit that this is a failure that truly bothers me, for a number of reasons. The more I think about it, the more frustrated I become. And you should feel the same way. No matter what your political beliefs happen to be, this is a story that has many ramifications — some obvious, some not so obvious — for the future of this country. As I’ll explain, there has never been a failure of this type that is this embarrassing in the history of the United States. The most troubling thing about this situation is what it says about the current state of our country. That’s why, on cable television right now, foreigners are telling millions of Americans that they should feel “unease” about honoring our country’s history.  Watch: Velshi: “I feel deep unease to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary” Ali Velshi became a citizen in 2015 pic.twitter.com/RapeyBniQ2 — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) May 31, 2026 That MS NOW host, as you probably are not aware, is named Ali Velshi. He was born in Kenya. He went to school in Canada. He was the guy who, during the George Floyd riots in Minneapolis in 2020, told everyone that the riot wasn’t “unruly,” as buildings went up in flames behind him.  Watch:  Minneapolis, May 2020. Velshi as fire raged behind him: “This is mostly a protest. It is not, generally speaking, unruly.” Same guy. https://t.co/AP313kJGPE pic.twitter.com/52KZp5gqk1 — Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) May 31, 2026 And now, as a proven liar — and as someone who isn’t American, who has no loyalty or love for this country — he is going on national television and telling Americans they should feel “uneasy” about celebrating their history. Something tells me that if I went to Kenya, or to India where his parents are from, and announced that they should be “uneasy” about celebrating their national holidays, or commemorating their history, Ali Velshi would be the first in line to call me a racist and a colonizer.  His goal could not be any more clear. And he’s not alone. The rest of the corporate press is also running cover for Leftists who want to terrorize America 250 events and destroy the country. Watch:   What’s interesting about that footage is that, while they read an excerpt from Bret Michaels’ post, they conveniently left out the most important part. So here’s what he wrote, in its entirety: “Unfortunately, what was presented to us as a celebration of our country has evolved into something much more divisive than what I agreed to be a part of. Concerns have also been raised regarding the safety of my fans, band, crew, family and myself, including threats that are completely unfounded and unforgivable. Because of that, I have made the difficult decision to step away from this performance.” So NBC News omitted the fact that, in pulling out of the event, Bret Michaels (the former frontman for the 80s band Poison) cited threats of domestic terrorism and political violence by violent Leftists. Many of these artists, we can assume, have similar concerns. And those concerns are not unfounded. If we’re being honest with ourselves, we all know there’s a very real possibility that a Leftist will attempt to murder anyone who celebrates the founding of America. This is, after all, a movement that openly cheered the assassination of a random health insurance CEO, as well as Charlie Kirk.   They’ve tried to murder Donald Trump more than any other president in American history. They have adopted the tactics of the Bolsheviks. And like the Bolsheviks, Leftists in America seek to violently topple the established order and murder tens of millions of people in the process. That’s why they’re telling musicians that they’ll be executed if they participate in an event that has anything to do with our country’s history. And it’s one of the reasons why many of these musicians are backing out. NBC News doesn’t want to say that out loud. But it’s true. But I can’t absolve the administration of responsibility here, because they’ve bungled the event as well. It’s looking like we will not have anything close to the raucous, joyous, patriotic celebration that our nation’s 250th deserves, and the blame for that failure can be cast in many directions.  Anyone who says the Trump administration itself is entirely blameless is just being a partisan shill, which I refuse to be. The fact is that, even before the artists started dropping out of Trump’s planned concert in droves, there was already a major problem. The problem is that those artists were invited to begin with. The administration had planned a concert featuring — and I’m not making this up — Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, a few other washed-up 80s acts, a rapper from 15 years ago called Flo Rida, and a couple other artists nobody cares about or even knew were still alive. The only thing sadder and more pathetic than a Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice concert getting canceled is a Milli Vanilli and Vanilla Ice concert not being canceled.  The lineup made no sense to begin with. It was a function of the conservative habit of pathetically latching onto any famous person who gives you the time of day, even if they’re only famous for being national punchlines, as is the case with the Vanilli and Vanilla tandem. And now that the worst musical artists in modern history are dropping out, the embarrassment is only compounded. It’s like asking the ugliest girl in school to go to the prom, and getting turned down — the ultimate humiliation.  So what’s plan B? How will the Administration pivot? Well, after a few more artists canceled their appearances, Trump posted the following message on social media: The basic idea is that Trump sees himself as more popular than Elvis in his prime. Therefore, he’s going to “give a major speech, rallying the country forward.” We don’t need any kind of musical performances or entertainment, Trump says. He is just going to host an “AMERICA IS BACK” rally on Wednesday in Washington, which he says will be a “wild and beautiful celebration of America.” In other words, we get another stump speech from the president. Now, I’ll freely admit that years ago, I was often entertained by Trump speeches. Most of the country was. He was saying things that no serious American presidential candidate had ever said before. But somewhere in the last half-decade, the speeches have started sounding pretty familiar. That’s not even a knock against Donald Trump. It’s an unavoidable fact of life that when someone gives speeches for a decade, they lose their novelty at a certain point.  We’ve still never seen a politician give a speech like Trump. But we have seen Trump give a speech like Trump, hundreds of times at this point. It’s not the kind of “main event” that’s going to draw in huge audiences. And more importantly, it’s not the best way to highlight the achievements of this country, going back hundreds of years. America 250 should be a party, a celebration. And nobody, in the entire history of parties, has ever wanted to sit and listen to a 90-minute speech from a politician. A political rally is not a party. What’s more, several of the acts that pulled out claimed they were doing so because the event was more political than they were initially told. Turning the event into a literal political rally would seem to legitimize their concerns. So Trump is handing them a PR victory, on top of everything else.  America 250 should not be about Trump. It should be about America. And that’s why a Trump speech should not be the main event. Now, I’ll be told — and have been told — that “they tried” to do it differently, but it didn’t work. That’s true. But the only thing they tried was to have a concert featuring Milli Vanilli, Vanilla Ice, and Bret Michaels. I would humbly suggest that there is a lot of room in between a concert featuring geriatric one-hit wonders from the 80s and a rambling 90-minute Donald Trump speech. Those are not the only two choices on the menu. For one thing, they could have a concert featuring military bands. That’s an act we knew for sure the White House can book, and it would be vastly superior to both Vanilla Ice and a political rally.  There are other options too. There’s simply no way that the administration can’t find talented performers to take the stage. Tim Burchett of Tennessee has come up with a few suggestions — some better than others. Watch: My suggestion to @realdonaldtrump for the 250th Celebration. pic.twitter.com/t51Yjj7uBY — Tim Burchett (@timburchett) May 31, 2026 I’m going to cut it off there, just because, as much as I respect Kid Rock’s patriotism, we can’t have Kid Rock doing everything. It’s a meme at this point. But as Burchett said, there are plenty of talented artists in Nashville who would jump at the opportunity to fly to D.C. and perform for a national audience. Nobody said that you have to have famous musicians play. I would make the bold suggestion that it’s better to have good musicians than famous ones, if you have to choose between the two. And maybe you do in this case. But you cannot convince me that there aren’t hundreds of musical acts in Nashville alone — never mind the rest of the country — who would leap at the chance to perform for an audience of millions.  Rather than trying to trade in on the meager fumes of whatever fame someone like Brett Michaels still possesses, why not have a concert featuring non-famous artists and MAKE them famous? That would be creating culture for a change, which is what we should be doing. It would take an extreme lack of creativity — or laziness — to conclude that there are no talented musicians anywhere in the country who can perform at this event. By the way, it’s not like our past is the only thing we have to be happy about, either. Even today, we’re doing far better at the moment than any Western nation. Unlike other Western nations — including Canada and the UK — we don’t imprison people for offending the cult of transgenderism. We don’t murder people and harvest their organs because they seem depressed at the local Tim Horton’s. We have a growing economy. We’re sending manned space missions farther into space than ever before. We have the best national parks in the world. It’s relatively easy to start a business here. We’re the world’s only superpower. Our quality of life is so high that everyone else is clamoring to get inside our borders. We’re one of the few places where you can own a gun and defend yourself. We have individual states that would rank among the world’s biggest economies. None of this was true in the 19th century.  So the current picture is not all doom and gloom, even though the media and the podcast circuit are motivated — for different reasons, or maybe not so different reasons — to tell you otherwise. And yet whatever challenges we face today — and there are many of them, and they are significant —  there’s no question that our history is undeniably great. We’re a nation forged from nothing. We defeated the world’s greatest empire. We forged West into the unknown, vanquishing hostile Indians and conquering the wilderness. We fought a civil war only 90 years into our existence, which could have been the end of the experiment. Instead, we survived it — and even thrived in the wake of the conflict. Over the next century, we went on to become a superpower, win two world wars, build a transcontinental railway, an interstate highway system, and the Panama Canal. We landed a man on the moon, invented the lightbulb, the airplane, the telephone, the internet. We’re a nation of innovators, builders, inventors, and pioneers. America 250 is about recognizing and appreciating all of that. If we no longer live up to the lofty standards set by our ancestors — and I don’t think we do — that’s no less reason to mark the occasion. In fact, it’s all the more reason. None of us today can hold a candle to the greatest Americans. That’s why our goal shouldn’t be to put on a political rally, or a concert of one-hit wonders. It should be to celebrate the greatness we inherited. So that maybe one day we can reclaim it.

The Trump administration is backing away from its nearly $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund after a pair of court setbacks and mounting opposition from congressional Republicans who warned the program threatened to derail other White House priorities. The Justice Department confirmed Monday it would comply with a federal court order temporarily blocking the fund, while multiple reports indicated the administration is now expected to scrap the effort altogether.  The fund, announced last month, was intended to compensate Americans whom the administration argues were unfairly targeted by government agencies during the Biden years. Supporters pointed to January 6 defendants, pro-life activists, parents targeted by federal law enforcement, and others they say were victims of politically motivated prosecutions and investigations. The $1.776 billion program originated from President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns. Critics argued the settlement amounted to an improper arrangement designed to create a massive compensation fund outside the normal congressional appropriations process. The proposal quickly ran into resistance from both the courts and Capitol Hill. A federal judge in Virginia on Friday temporarily blocked the government from moving forward with the fund, preventing any money from being transferred or distributed while legal challenges continue. Judge Leonie Brinkema said the order was necessary to ensure no funds were “irreversibly disbursed” before the court could fully consider the legality of the program. A separate legal challenge emerged in Florida, where U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams reopened scrutiny of the settlement that created the fund. In her ruling Friday, Williams ordered the parties to address allegations of collusion and explain whether the settlement represented a legitimate adversarial agreement. The legal setbacks came as frustration was boiling over among Republicans on Capitol Hill. The fund sparked concerns that January 6 defendants who assaulted police officers during the Capitol riot could become eligible for compensation. Lawmakers also raised questions about the lack of transparency surrounding the program and the broad discretion granted to officials overseeing it. According to reports, Senate Republicans delivered a blunt message to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche during a closed-door meeting last month, warning that legislation central to Trump’s agenda could be jeopardized if concerns over the fund were not addressed. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) publicly expressed skepticism Monday, saying he hoped the administration would shut the program down on its own. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) also met with Trump at the White House Monday as controversy surrounding the fund continued to grow. The Justice Department maintained that the program was intended to compensate victims of government abuse regardless of political affiliation. “The Department of Justice disagrees strongly with the decision on the Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the department wrote in a statement Monday. “This Fund was open to anybody who was so weaponized, targeted, or persecuted, whether they were Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Independent, or otherwise.” The department added that it would nevertheless comply with the court’s order. Only days earlier, the administration had aggressively defended the proposal. In May, the Justice Department insisted it would not allow judges to interfere with efforts to provide restitution to victims of what they characterized as government “lawfare.” Now, facing legal challenges, bipartisan criticism, and growing Republican opposition, the administration appears prepared to move on from the effort rather than spend additional political capital defending it. The decision leaves unresolved a central question raised by many Trump allies since the president returned to office: whether Americans who believe they were unfairly targeted by federal agencies during the Biden administration will ultimately receive compensation or other forms of restitution.