More Judgment Fun(d)

Some lose ends from the vault today.

After writing, a couple of weeks ago, about Trump paying the French energy conglomerate TotalEnergies not to do wind turbines, I became kind of fascinated with the Judgment Fund.

The Judgment Fund, remember, is that permanent, indefinite, never empty piggy bank that US agencies can use to pay real or, lately, seemingly made-up legal settlements. The fund was set up by Congress so that they wouldn't have to waste time voting to appropriate the funds for every single lawsuit the government lost.

Who knew that was going to be a big deal. I mean, how many law suits can the government lose in a year? I mean, Congress only worked 169 legislative days last year. So we stiffs, who work 5 days a week for 50 weeks a year (if only!) – checks calculator … 250 days last year – we need our own Judgment Fund I guess.

Anyway, here's some fun facts I learned about the Judgment Fund.

We'll split the bill

The settlement with TotalEnergies totaled $928,333,333. I was able to track this to the payment database of the Judgment Fund using the dates and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management as the agency. Just curious. I expected to find a payment of $928,333,333 on one of the lines of the table. Instead, there were 10 lines. Here's a snippet with the relevant fields selected from the database:

The "Agency" is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). That's good. Although there are 10 lines, notice there are only two different "Control #" values. Using just the last four digits: ~3523 paid on April 23, and ~3393 paid on April 24. Yup! Those are the dates for the settlement payments listed in the BOEM documents. I'm in the right place.

If you add up the 8 lines for Control # ~3523 it comes to $795 million, which is the exact settlement for the Attentive offshore wind farm lease. The two lines for Control # ~3392 add up to $133,333,333, which is exactly the settlement for the other TotalEnergies lease. (I keep wondering what happened to the missing 33¢. Maybe the Trump Interior Department doesn't make cents.)

But why split up the payments like this? It's not a big deal, but I was puzzled. Is the data entry specialist superstitious about typing $100,000,000? Did Fiscal run out of fingers?

Well, sort of. Here's the explanation:

"The Judgment Fund Internet Claims System (JFICS) has a 10-character limit in the payment amount field. Therefore, if the claim you’re submitting is for $100 million or more, you’ll need to break the total amount into smaller components, none of which may exceed $99,999,999.99."

This is pretty amusing. Y2K anyone? I couldn't find out when the JFICS code was written (or if maybe it is coded in your grandfather's COBOL; or even coded by your grandfather) but the live database search goes back to 2007. Just imagine the programmers sitting around the table back in '06:

"How big should we make the payments field?"

"I say 10 characters. Eight for the dollars, and two for the cents. Surely no one is ever going to sue the government for $100 million dollars or more!"

"Right! 10 it is! Time for lunch."

Note, TotalEnergies could have included that 33¢. There was room in the data field!

So that's it. Because of old computer code, a 1 billion dollar settlement must be broken up into ten $99,999,999 amounts, plus an 11th payment of $10 to top it off. If you don't want to make cents.

Everything but the claimant

You might expect that Congress, having legislated a bottomless money pot into existence, you might expect that they would want to sort of keep track of how it is being used. And you'd be right. Every year Treasury spins up an "Annual Report to Congress."

They're not what you expect; they're just humongous relational database tables. Here's how Fiscal describes the contents of this Annual Report:

As requested by the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations, the Department of the Treasury is providing the following reports on the Judgment Fund. The Committees have requested that these reports include:

• the agency or entity whose actions gave rise to the claim or judgment,
• the name of the plaintiff or claimant,
• the name of the counsel for the plaintiff or claimant,
• the amount paid representing principal liability,
• any amounts paid representing any ancillary liability, including attorney fees, costs, and interest,
• a description of the facts that gave rise to the claim, and the agency that submitted the claim.

You can download these Reports in various machine-readable formats. And so I did. I got the default 5 year report from Sep 30, 2020 to Sep 30, 2025 as a 'CSV' ("comma separated variables") file. It is easy to load this file into an SQL relational database for query. And so I did.

I cruised around for a while, just observing the various fields of waving grain. Then, I thought it might be educational to see which claimant got the biggest payout from 2020 to 2025. After all, the name of the claimant is second on the list of items up there that Treasury claims Congress wants to see.

It's not there. There are 23 fields in these tables with a data dictionary to match. The plaintiff or claimant is not among those fields. The closest you can get is a field coded for "Plaintiffs Counsel Name," which is defined as:

Legal representative for the plaintiff or claimant. This field is optional and is not always provided by the submitting agency in part because not every claimant has legal representation.

I imagine some poor Senate staffer, maybe a sleuth-type in Sheldon Whitehouse's office, might actually know how to drill down to this information if its needed, a "join" with some other database living at some other strange place perhaps, but it's not easily visible to the public from the Reports served up by Treasury. And maybe it shouldn't be.

I sent an email via the friendly envelope icon on the Judgment Fund site, <Judgment.fund fiscal.treasury.gov>, to ask about this apparent discrepancy. I'll let you know if I hear anything.

The big and little of it

Ruling out the settlements under seal, and the settlements for $0 dollars, the smallest settlement from fiscal years 2020 to 2025 was for $2.75 against the Bureau of Prisons under the Small Claims Act. That's pretty cool, eh? Score one for the little guy. I presume. Do I think the name of this claimant should be public? No. Do I want to know who the claimant was? No, except maybe to offer the claimant a bonus $2.75 for the gumption to go squeeze a Small Claims Act settlement out of the Bureau of Prisons.

What about the largest settlement?

That's trickier because the amount must be aggregated over the multiple lines of the same control number. See TotalEnergies payments, above. As best I can wave my SQL magic wand – I could be wrong – the largest single control number payment over that 5-year period was for $282,869,476.33 for "Breach of Express Contract" against the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). "Where was Dr. Oz while this was going on?" he jokes. That's about $283 million. And 33¢.

A few things here:

• I have no idea what this large settlement was all about. Searching by CMS, amount, date, and the law firm turned up nothing but AI gibberish. It might be out there, but I couldn't find it through the Judgment Fund records, or spot it floating about in the all-powerful internet.
• Do I think this claimant should be made public in the Judgment Fund Annual Report to Congress? Well, that's harder to say. $283 million is starting to be real money. What if the claimant also donated $10 million to the Trump-and-Epstein Ballroom? That "pay-for-payout" might be important to track.
• The Report does list the law firm representing the claimant in this case, and they are rock solid counsel; one of the most prominent health care litigation firms in the country. So it is very unlikely that there is a problem with the transaction. This time.
• Last, but not least, the multi-billion dollar payments in 2026 to bribe energy companies not to do energy, and the one proposed to pay off Trump toadies (which, despite Blanche's attestation, the White House is still litigating), these are getting way out of line. Trump's "Weaponization" fund, for example, would be over 6 times the largest Judgment Fund payment (that I could find) made over the previous 5 years.