50501 FRIDAY BRIEFING | MAY 22, 2026
This week: voter rolls, the Iran war-powers fight, weakened drinking-water rules, and a $1.8 billion settlement fund and the question of accountability running underneath all of them.
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This week we are running the Friday Briefing a little differently.
We have heard from a lot of you that inboxes are full and the pace of the news is hard to keep up with. So we’re sending fewer emails and using this Friday recap to gather the week in one place. When a single story needs more room, we will still publish a full explainer, and those are linked at the end.
Voter rolls moved to the center of the midterm fight
The Trump administration has now run at least 67 million voter registrations through a Department of Homeland Security verification system known as SAVE, with the stated goal of identifying noncitizens and people who have died, the Associated Press reported.
Tens of thousands have been flagged as potential noncitizens, and far more as potentially deceased.
Sixty-seven million is an enormous file, and the share flagged as potential noncitizens is a tiny fraction of it but a tiny fraction of a huge number is still a lot of individual people, and a flagging error only stays harmless if there’s enough time and a clear enough process to fix it.
In states that give voters just a few weeks to prove eligibility, or that suspend a registration right away, a wrongful flag can turn into a missed election.
The administration also kept losing in court. On Thursday, federal judges in Maine and Wisconsin dismissed Justice Department lawsuits trying to force those states to hand over detailed voter data, including birth dates, addresses, and partial Social Security numbers, the AP reported. Those rulings were the latest in a run of defeats that also includes Arizona, California, Massachusetts, Michigan, Oregon, and Rhode Island, the DOJ has sued at least 30 states and the District of Columbia for that data and has appealed several of the losses.
One of those earlier rejections came from a Trump-appointed judge in Michigan. The legal problem is not confined to one party’s view of it. The consistent thread across the rulings is that a broad federal demand for sensitive voter-file data is not the same thing as election security.
A presidential lawsuit became a $1.8 billion payout program
On Monday, the Justice Department announced a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” created as part of a settlement of the lawsuit President Trump filed earlier this year against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Under the deal, which the DOJ described in its own announcement, Trump, his two adult sons, and the Trump Organization drop the suit and receive a formal apology but no monetary payment.
What has drawn the most concern is how it’s built:
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense attorney, established the fund and will handpick the five-member commission that decides who gets paid, and the process is largely shielded from court review, Axios reported.
Eligibility appears broad. Blanche told lawmakers that “anybody can apply,” saying the commission would set the detailed rules later, and he did not rule out payments to people convicted of assaulting police on January 6.
Vice President Vance has separately suggested that figures as different as former Colorado clerk Tina Peters and Hunter Biden could qualify. At least one Jan. 6 defendant has already said publicly that he intends to apply.
That prompted a direct challenge.. Daniel Hodges, a Metropolitan Police officer, and Harry Dunn, a former Capitol Police officer both who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 and later testified before Congress about it, sued on Wednesday to block any payouts, describing the fund in their complaint as an illegal slush fund, the AP reported.
Congress moved on the Iran war, then House leaders pulled the vote
For the first time, a war-powers resolution on the Iran conflict cleared a procedural hurdle in the Senate.
On Tuesday, the chamber voted 50-47 to advance the measure after four Republicans, Rand Paul, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy, joined Democrats, CBS News reported.
The conflict has now passed the 60-day mark set by the War Powers Resolution without congressional authorization, which is part of why the pressure on Congress has intensified.
The House was expected to take up its own version on Thursday. Instead, Republican leaders delayed the vote into June, after appearing to lack the votes to defeat it, according to the AP.
The measure’s sponsor, Rep. Gregory Meeks, said he believed it would have passed. A similar House resolution had fallen on a tie vote the week before.
The Constitution assigns the power to declare war to Congress, and the 1973 War Powers Resolution exists precisely to keep presidents from waging open-ended conflicts without it, which is part of why a delayed vote reads as its own kind of answer about how leadership expected that vote to go.
Health and environmental rules keep getting loosened
The EPA moved this week to weaken federal drinking-water protections for PFAS “forever chemicals,” a story we covered in a full article.
The proposal, announced May 18, would keep the existing limits for two of the most-studied compounds, PFOA and PFOS, while giving water systems an extra two years, until 2031, to comply.
It would also rescind the regulatory determinations and related federal drinking-water requirements for four others: PFHxS, PFNA, GenX, and the Hazard Index that governs mixtures of them, lifting the monitoring and treatment obligations tied to those compounds.
According to the EPA, the agency has scheduled a virtual public hearing for July 7 and is accepting written comments through July 20.
Then on Thursday, the administration loosened federal refrigerant rules for grocery stores and air-conditioning companies, easing limits on hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, the AP reported.
Trump presented the change at a White House event as a way to bring down grocery prices.
Industry and environmental critics pushed back, noting that HFCs are potent climate pollutants and that some U.S. companies had already invested in the alternatives the rule was designed to encourage.
Immigration prosecutions, colliding with the courts
In Chicago, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against the four remaining members of the “Broadview Six,” a group of protesters arrested last fall outside an ICE facility. Charges against the other two had already been dropped earlier this spring.
The dismissal was striking less for the outcome than for the reason behind it. The U.S. Attorney dropped the case with prejudice, meaning it can’t be refiled, after a closed-door hearing in which the judge described apparent misconduct by prosecutors before the grand jury, NPR Illinois reported.
Defense attorneys called it an intentional cover-up, and the judge signaled the prosecutors involved could face sanctions.
ABC7 Chicago reported that the office has yet to win a conviction in any criminal case tied to its Operation Midway Blitz enforcement surge.
The Justice Department swore in its largest class of immigration judges ever, 77 permanent judges and five temporary ones drawn from the military, bringing the bench back to roughly 700 after the administration removed more than 100 judges since Trump returned to office.
AI is being folded deeper into federal enforcement
HHS announced it will expand its use of artificial intelligence.
ChatGPT among other tools, to review audit reports from all 50 states and from federal grant recipients, including state Medicaid programs and grantees in research and addiction services, the AP reported. Recipients that fail to file required audits, or to resolve flagged problems, could lose funding.
Catching fraud is a legitimate use of government resources. However, the caution is everything surrounding AI as a primary tool.
AI systems produce confident-sounding mistakes and can carry hidden biases, and the administration’s anti-fraud push has so far fallen heavily on Democratic-led states.
Earlier this spring, the administration acknowledged a significant error in data it had used to justify a New York Medicaid fraud investigation, the kind of mistake that becomes difficult to catch once an automated system is making the first pass.
The symbolism is growing
On Thursday, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts approved the design plan for the 250-foot triumphal arch Trump wants built on Memorial Circle, between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery, the AP reported.
The commissioners, all Trump appointees, approved it despite overwhelming public opposition.
Members said they had received more than 600 letters against the project.
The project still needs review by another federal panel before construction can move forward.
What to watch for:
The Iran war-powers vote was pushed past the Memorial Day recess, so the House question returns in June rather than closing this week.
The voter-data lawsuits keep going against the DOJ, but the department is appealing several and is still running registrations through SAVE, so the broader pressure on state voter files continues even as individual cases fail.
The Anti-Weaponization Fund’s basic terms remain unsettled. Who qualifies, who sits on the commission, and whether payouts will ever be disclosed.
The PFAS rulemaking is open for public comment through July 20, with a virtual hearing on July 7, one of the clearest near-term openings for the public to weigh in directly.
Our Recent Articles
Trump Dropped His IRS Lawsuit. Now There’s a $1.8 Billion Taxpayer Fund. A closer look at the settlement, the new Anti-Weaponization Fund, and the questions that actually matter: who qualifies, who decides, whether Jan. 6 defendants could benefit, and whether the payout list will ever be public.
Trump’s EPA Moved to Weaken Drinking Water Rules. Here’s What It Does. A breakdown of the PFAS rollback: which limits are kept, which are rescinded, how the 2031 deadline extension works, and how to take part in the public-comment window.
Dancing Todd committed and daily dancing for democracy!
They're trying to take away all of our protections, not caring who dies from it just so that they can put more money in their pockets. If prices go down from it, magas will think it's a good thing, not thinking about the harm that's being done by drinking water or the policies that have rolled back hurting us.
AI can cause deaths, never liked it. We need people, Not machines. This is just another way for this crooked government to push propaganda and steal from the working class. Trump and GOP are the fraudsters. They're the Ones that are corrupt.