Click to expand Image An American flag flies outside the Department of Justice in Washington, March 22, 2019. © 2019 AP Photo/Andrew Harnik The Trump administration’s decision to establish a US$1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate participants of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, has triggered widespread public outrage. Many people, including Black reparations movement leaders and advocates, have pointed out a jarring double standard: as the administration moves quickly to provide financial redress for its political base, decades of institutional and systemic harm against Black people in the United States continue to be met with legislative and executive silence and gridlock.The contrast is impossible to ignore. When it comes to addressing the compounding, documented legacies of enslavement and racial discrimination, the state’s default response has long been to demand infinite patience. For decades, Congress has refused to pass federal legislation, such as H.R. 40, even to study the issue of reparations.While federal courts subject the legality of President Trump’s fund to scrutiny, the Trump administration’s actions are a stark reminder of unmet US human rights responsibilities. It reinforces the impression that the lack of federal progress on racial justice is not a matter of legal or economic capability, but a choice of prioritization and importance.Yet even in the absence of federal action, momentum toward true reparations continues to build through local and state-level initiatives. Jurisdictions like Evanston, Illinois, which established the country’s first municipal reparations program, and New York State, through its reparations commission, prove that structural models to repair historical harm can successfully be realized.If the federal government can be bent to perform victimhood for political allies, it should certainly be possible to utilize it to address some of the nation’s actual and deepest historical wounds. Congress should immediately reintroduce and pass legislation to study and implement federal reparations for the legacies of enslavement.The capacity for redress exists: the federal government simply needs the will to apply it.