Justice Fund
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department announced a $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund to be distributed to people targeted by the government. The fund was created in a settlement after Trump sued the IRS for leaking his tax return. The out-of-court settlement permanently ended any investigations into Trump, his family members and his businesses. In exchange, Trump dropped his lawsuit against the government.
There was immediate outcry that this is a slush fund for Trump allies and those charged with participation in the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 participants as soon as he got into office. There are more than 30 residents of North Carolina who faced charges for that day. And since Trump allies could also try to claim the funds, it’s worth noting that Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows and his attorney Sidney Powell, both former North Carolina residents, were charged, and the latter convicted for the part they played in attempting to overturn President Joe Biden’s election.
Two of the officers injured during the insurrection have already filed a lawsuit to stop the money from being distributed.
“I think it’s stupid on stilts,” U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis told Spectrum News. “It will invariably put us in a position where my taxpayer dollars and your taxpayer dollars could potentially compensate someone who assaulted a police officer, admitted their guilt, got convicted, got pardoned, and now we’re going to pay them for that.”
The Republican from Huntersville called that “absurd” and said Americans will reject it. “When you take money from me to give to a purpose that I vehemently disagree with, that’s tyranny and that’s what that account is,” he added.
U.S. Treasury General Counsel Brian Morrissey resigned quickly after the settlement’s announcement One more important piece of context with this new fund is it expires just weeks before Trump leaves office.
The Republican nominee to succeed Tillis, Michael Whatley, said he emphatically supports Trump’s proposal. Asked at a Brunswick County GOP event on Wednesday if he will be on the president’s side on the fund, which has faced fierce objections from senators on both sides of the aisle, Whatley committed to doing so in remarks first reported by Punchbowl News. “I will be because I have been with him since 2015,” Whatley said on an audio recording of the event. “We’ll see how they implement it and what they’re going to do with it. I mean, they overstretched with the ridiculous persecution.”
A month into the short session, lawmakers are taking a weeklong break to spend time in their districts and with their families as budget work continues among top negotiators in both chambers.
Both the House and Senate adjourned on Wednesday after wrapping up this week’s legislative business, which included consideration of several constitutional amendments, and passage of two that will ask voters if the state’s income tax rate cap should be lowered, and if the General Assembly should take action to limit property tax rate hikes enacted by local governments.
No votes are expected until the week of June 2.
The decision to leave Raleigh for a week received criticism from some Democrats, but House Speake Destin Hall told reporters on Wednesday that now was the right time to give members a week off while House and Senate budget chairs and chairs of area-specific appropriations committees hammer out a spending plan both chambers can agree on.
“Those chairs, some of them, I imagine, will be here, or they’ll be meeting somewhere, because they’re now doing the hard work, which is sitting in a room for eight hours a day, going through every line item in state government,” Hall said.
Hall had advised the House at the start of this year’s session that votes wouldn’t be expected next week.
Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger said this week that the Senate was also taking a break next week, following the House’s lead, while budget negotiations continue.
Berger said Sen. Brent Jackson, a senior budget writer who is leading the chamber’s talks with the House, told him on Wednesday that budget chairs were making progress and remained on track to deliver a spending plan in time to be voted on during the week of June 15.
Asked what unresolved issues remain between both chambers, Berger said the budget chairs were now immersed in area-specific and line-item work that involves “just a lot of detail.”
“Each of the subchair levels are looking at their part of the budget, they have a schedule to report to the full chairs and talk about things, the full chairs will listen to what they’ve got, they’ll agree or disagree, flag, not flag, add, subtract — it just takes a while,” Berger told reporters on Wednesday.
Senate Democratic Leader Sydney Batch was critical of the decision to take a weeklong break, telling reporters on Tuesday that “North Carolinians sure as shit ain’t getting a week off.”
“They’re working every single day, and a lot of them, two jobs,” Batch said. “They may not even get Memorial Day off.”
House Democratic Leader Robert Reives, meanwhile, said he believed that “anytime you can give folks a break up here is good.”
“If we’re not going to be inside writing a budget, and we don’t have anything else to do, I don’t want folks up here,” Reives told reporters on Wednesday.
“Because the problem is, especially on my side of the aisle — we’ve got a lot of young people with children, with families that are taking care of their parents, all kinds of things going on, and I do appreciate, and I sincerely mean this, I appreciate the fact that Speaker Hall has made a lot of effort to make sure that if we don’t have to be here, we’re not here,” he said.
Reives said that prior to Hall’s tenure as speaker, “if we had one bill, you know, there was some local bill that was just passing something real quick, we’d be up here.”
“And I don’t want to do that,” Reives said.
I-77 Tolls
Desiree Mathurin and DJ Simmons, The Charlotte Observer, 5/21/26
After hours of comments, questions and motions, the Charlotte Regional Transportation Planning Organization revoked its support of the funding agreement for the Interstate 77 South toll lane project. It’s the second surprise vote on the controversial $3.2 billion project in the past week.
Last week, Charlotte City Council voted to cancel its support of the funding agreement. That prompted CRTPO’s action Wednesday night. The project appears dead for now.
After the vote, the state weighed in. “This vote means the loss of $700M in critical transportation funding designed to address congestion, crash rates and community driven priorities for the Charlotte region,” the North Carolina Department of Transportation said in a statement to Observer news partner WSOC. But the vote was met with applause from residents, who for the past seven months have been against the project due to its design and what community members say has been a lack of transparency from NCDOT.
Charlotte represents a near majority of CRTPO’s weighted voting system. With Charlotte’s support of revocation, CRTPO no longer supports the public-private partnership funding mechanism for the project.
Sean Langley, president of the McCrorey Heights Association, was among those excited by the vote. He said this was the correct path to address residents’ concerns. “This is what we need to send a clear message to NCDOT, that you can’t overlook the process and you can’t overlook the people,” Langley said. “You have to do things that are in the best interest of all Charlotteans.”
The meeting room was also filled with uncertainty and a wonder if the action would spark repercussions. NCDOT committed $600 million to the project and already has spent about $60 million. Without the partnership, NCDOT has said there’s no other financially feasible alternative to move the project forward. And it said the $600 million would go back to the state and be redistributed to other projects.
NCDOT Secretary Daniel Johnson sent a letter to Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles last week confirming that Charlotte would lose out on the $600 million, along with an additional $100 million that would have been spent on transportation projects of the city’s choosing. That brings the total funding in play to $700 million, which the agency referenced in its Wednesday night statement.
Johnson added the project would also be removed from the state’s transportation prioritization improvement list. I-77 South was placed on that list in 2014 and was only approved because of the funding agreement. It’s unclear if CRTPO’s vote ends the conversation on I-77 between the organization and NCDOT. Charlotte City Council and residents said they want the discourse to continue, but at a slower pace and with the community in mind.
EV Factory
In 2022, Vietnamese carmarker VinFast, billing itself as a major global player in electric vehicles, announced it would build a megafactory to produce EVs and batteries on a sprawling site in Chatham County, bringing $4 billion in investment and 7,500 jobs to the largely rural area. The state of North Carolina rushed to secure the deal, promising the “transformative project” a rich economic development package, including half a billion dollars in state job incentives as well as around $400 million in local incentives and property tax breaks, plus new roads, free land and training programs.
Four years later, the state is suing to claw back the land and around $80 million it already gave VinFast. State Attorney General Jeff Jackson announced Thursday his office has filed suit in Wake County Superior Court against the company on behalf of the North Carolina Department of Commerce.
Jackson said that the company breached its contracts with the state.
“VinFast agreed to build a factory and create jobs for North Carolinians — it didn’t do either,” Jackson said in a statement. “When North Carolina makes a deal, we build in protection for taxpayers. VinFast broke the deal, so we’re using that protection to find a project for this site that will create jobs.”
VinFast officials did not immediately respond to NC Newsline’s request for comment. The lawsuit comes on the same day Reuters reported VinFast is planning to exit manufacturing and is selling its two main factories in Vietnam.
The North Carolina factory was supposed to be under construction by 2024 and operational by 2026. But the Moncure site, according to the filing, has been largely abandoned since the end of 2024. The company hasn’t had a construction contract since the end of that year, and the building and environmental permits VinFast had obtained expired and were not renewed.
VinFast has said publicly that it does not expect its facility will be operational until at least 2028. But in the lawsuit, Jackson said the state never agreed to extend the timeline for the contract. And he said there’s no evidence that any work is currently underway at the site, despite the company’s insistence that it is.
According to the complaint, VinFast executives were informed they were in default in January 2026 after a year of state inquiries and requests for verification of funding or work at the site.
The lawsuit says company executives claimed as recently as March 2026 that they were about to resume construction, but had proposed drastically scaling back the project, perhaps to just a distribution center instead of a car factory.
On Thursday, Gov. Josh Stein said VinFast Manufacturing simply did not honor its commitments or meet previously agreed upon benchmarks. “Today’s action is about protecting taxpayers and getting the Chatham County mega-site back on the market to support future good-paying manufacturing jobs,” Stein said.
Work Amendment
North Carolina voters in November could get to decide whether limiting labor unions to minimal power, which has been codified in state law for nearly 80 years, should be enshrined in the state’s Constitution. The state Senate on Wednesday advanced a bill that would put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, allowing voters to choose if the amendment passes. The bill now moves to the House.
The amendment states that “the right to work must be protected and maintained free from undue restraints and coercion,” and that right “shall not be denied or abridged on account of membership or nonmembership in any labor union or labor organization or association.”
The amendment is one of a few that could be put to the will of North Carolinians in November.
A separate constitutional amendment known as the “right to farm,” which would enshrine the right to cultivate crops and livestock, could be put to voters this year as well.
Democratic lawmakers have criticized the amendments because these same rights are also state law. Republican lawmakers have defended the decision and said the goal is to further protect the rights by placing them in the state’s constitution.
Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters on Tuesday that the party is hoping to appeal to the citizens of North Carolina. He said he didn’t know whether the amendments were attempts to get out the Republican vote, “but obviously if it’s something that’s popular with the people and it brings more people out to vote, I think everybody ought to be in favor.”