Can You Sue the Government for Wasting Your Tax Dollars? The Answer Will Make You Angry.

A trial lawyer breaks down what the Constitution actually lets you do about the slush fund, the Ballroom, and the White House cage fights.

One of the questions I get asked most often is whether or not you can sue Trump or his administration over things like the weaponization slush fund, the Ballroom, the money lost from restitution ordered by the court to be paid by convicted felons subsequently being waived because of Trump’s pardons, wasted money spent on the Iran war, or taxpayer money flowing to UFC fights at the White House. Rather than answer each DM privately, I thought I’d just share a post with my answer.

Here is the hard truth. As an individual citizen, your standing to walk into federal court and challenge how the government spends money is almost nonexistent. The Supreme Court built this wall in 1923 in Frothingham v. Mellon and has reinforced it ever since. Your status as a citizen and taxpayer does not buy you a ticket to sue. The court calls your concerns a generalized grievance, one that every citizen shares, so no single citizen owns a concrete injury. To get into court you need an injury that is personal to you, traceable to the government’s action, and fixable by a court order.

That test comes from Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife in 1992, and watching your money get burned on cage fights and gold paint does not clear it. One narrow crack exists. Under Flast v. Cohen in 1968, a taxpayer can sue when Congress specifically appropriates money in a way that violates the Establishment Clause.

Here’s an example of how that narrow crack would work. Imagine Congress passes a law that appropriates $50 million in direct grants to churches to fund Sunday worship services. A taxpayer could sue to stop it, because the money flows from a specific congressional appropriation and the spending plainly props up religion in violation of the Establishment Clause.

Here is the catch that makes the exception so narrow. The spending has to come from a specific congressional appropriation, not from executive discretion. If the President takes a pot of general operating money and decides on his own to fund a faith-based conference, no taxpayer standing. If Congress writes the religious spending into the appropriation itself, standing exists.

The court has spent decades shrinking that crack. In Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation in 2007, it ruled that discretionary spending by the executive branch, drawn from general appropriations, falls outside even that exception. So a president steering general funds toward a pet project sits in the single hardest zone to challenge.

Class actions do not rescue you. A class action multiplies plaintiffs, and zero standing multiplied by a million plaintiffs with zero standing still equals zero, because at least one named plaintiff must independently show a real injury. You also run straight into sovereign immunity, the rule that the United States cannot be sued unless it consents, and Congress sets the terms of that consent.

Here is where real leverage lives. The challenges that actually move forward come from people and organizations who suffer a direct, particular harm and sue under the Administrative Procedure Act, which lets courts set aside unlawful agency action. The APA helps because it waives the government’s immunity for that kind of suit, but it does not lower the injury bar, so the plaintiff still needs concrete harm and an interest the statute was meant to protect. Watchdog organizations with members who are directly harmed carry many of these fights.

Here’s an example of an APA case. When the Biden administration tried to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in federal student debt, the program was challenged under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Biden administration’s stated reason to take this action was to try and help people with COVID pandemic relief. The legal hook was the 2003 HEROES Act, which lets the Secretary of Education waive or modify student loan rules during a national emergency. The COVID-19 emergency was the trigger. The argument was that borrowers should not be left worse off financially because of the pandemic, so the administration moved to cancel up to $20,000 in debt for eligible borrowers, with the relief targeted by income.

The plaintiffs were six Republican-led states: Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina, with their attorneys general bringing the suit. They argued the Department of Education exceeded its statutory authority and skipped required procedures. Courts agreed the agency action could be reviewed and set aside. While I was in favor of the pandemic relief and didn’t like the outcome of the case, it’s a good example of how the APA works in action: someone with a concrete stake challenges a specific agency decision as unlawful, and a court has the power to strike it down.

What you can do is support and fund those groups, push Congress and the courts to enforce the spending laws already on the books, and use your vote and your voice as the accountability tools the Constitution actually hands you. The courthouse door is mostly closed to the individual taxpayer. The ballot box, the oversight process, and organized public pressure stand wide open. Use all of these tools in this year’s midterms.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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