Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion. Here’s what that actually means.

In January, President Donald Trump, along with his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and the Trump Organization, sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department for $10 billion, arguing that the agencies failed to take measures to protect his tax information. There are obvious ethical issues inherent in the president suing government agencies he oversees, but the scale of Trump’s demand for taxpayer dollars makes this case truly extraordinary. 

Every other president and major party nominee for the past 50 years has voluntarily disclosed their personal tax information to the public to proactively provide transparency to the American people about their financial entanglements and potential conflicts of interest, and no past president has brought with them the number of clear financial conflicts Trump has.

Now, Trump and his sons are suing for about two-thirds of the IRS’ total budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which is $15.2 billion. Even though the federal government has vigorously, and successfully, refused to pay any monetary damages in response to similar lawsuits over the same unauthorized leaks of taxpayer information, there is a significant risk that Trump and his appointees will treat this case differently and agree to an unprecedented, collusive settlement in Trump’s favor. Trump himself has confirmed as much, telling the press: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself.” If that were to happen, it would divert taxpayer funds to roughly double Trump’s net worth, in order to compensate him for the leak of tax information that he should have released in the first place.

The most recent estimates put Trump’s net worth at somewhere between $7.3 billion and more than $10 billion — an explosion from the year before, which was already an outlier. In 2024, Forbes estimated Trump’s net worth was about $3.9 billion, which was already higher than all but two of the years Forbes has tracked his wealth, going back to 1983. But over the past year, Trump has monetized the presidency with the zeal and ambition of a python trying to swallow the Empire State Building, making his first year back in office “the most lucrative year of his life,” according to Forbes. Don Jr. and Eric Trump have both also seen their fortunes explode during Trump’s second term. Most of the Trump family’s wealth is locked in real estate and cryptocurrency holdings that are not easy or possible to access. Demanding $10 billion in taxpayer money would not just double Trump’s current net worth, it would also unlock a mountain of liquidity for the family and their company. 

This is not the first time Trump has demanded taxpayer funds from the government he leads. In October, the New York Times reported that Trump asked his own Department of Justice to pay him about $230 million to compensate for the investigations into his handling of classified documents and the investigation into possible collusion with the Russian government in the 2016 election. In both of these cases, Trump is the plaintiff, demanding redress, and the head of the executive branch that has to review his complaints—an astounding conflict of interest and ethical quagmire for all involved. 

When Trump took office, he promised to cut wasteful government spending by eliminating programs and decimating the federal workforce. With this lawsuit, he’s demanding more from the American taxpayers than some key government programs cost to run—including many that his administration tried to cut in the name of government efficiency.

Here are some examples of how far $10 billion could go:

• Trump’s administration attempted to make $4 billion in cuts to the National Institutes of Health’s medical research, developing treatments for things like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular conditions like heart failure. Had these cuts not been saved by Congress and the courts, $10 billion could pay for those programs more than twice over.
• Trump’s administration gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from abusive and deceptive financial practices. $10 billion would cover the entirety of the $7.3 billion in cumulative federal funding the CFPB has received since its formation in 2011, a period during which the agency recovered $26 billion for American consumers.
• Trump’s administration cut two programs that provided federal assistance for schools and food banks to buy local food from farms, which cost a total of $1 billion per year. $10 billion would have paid for the program for ten years. 
• Trump’s administration froze $10 billion in federal funds for child care subsidies, social services and cash support for hundreds of low-income families in five states. $10 billion could cover the entirety of those funds. 

$10 billion is also a huge chunk of the roughly $12 billion in disaster relief FEMA grants every year, as well as enough to cover 20 years of the Peace Corps budget or nearly five years of the National Park Service’s budget — and it’s ten times more than the $1 billion the administration has proposed to cut from the NPS budget. 

In an interview with NBC earlier this month, Trump suggested that he would give all of the money from these lawsuits to charity. But leaving aside Trump’s checkered history with claims of donating to charity, taking billions in congressionally appropriated funds and directing them to a set of charities they were not appropriated for presents its own legal and ethical issues, and Trump’s claim that the recipients would be “approved by the government or whatever” does not inspire confidence. Even if Trump were to donate the settlement to charity, that would also provide a financial benefit to him by allowing him to deduct the settlement on his taxes.

Trump’s $10 billion cash grab from the IRS is an ethical disaster that would likely make him dramatically wealthier while sticking American taxpayers with an outrageous bill that could instead be used to fund programs that actually help people. Instead, Trump is intent on exploiting the disclosure of tax records he should have made public to begin with.