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The Judgment Fund: America's Deepest Pocket & Its Susceptibility To Executive Branch Misuse, Paul F. Figley

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Over the last thirty-five years, the United States government has paid out billions of dollars in settlements that have had no fiscal consequences for the agencies whose actions caused the claims. It has done so through the Judgment Fund, a relatively unknown permanent, indefinite appropriation originally created by Congress almost half a century ago to pay certain types of judgments entered against the United States.

Congress struggled for nearly two hundred years to find a way to exercise its Appropriations Clause authority over claims payments that did not drown its members in procedural detail. The article surveys that history. Through …