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Most previous cases revolve around active fraud, noncompliance or unintentional mispayments, although I'll note that the latter have pretty wide avenues for relief and you get deep into equittable relief estoppel whatever really quick. Even there, a lot of the clawbacks come under other specific statutory authorization.
I can't find anything that's about intentional disbursements that a different DOJ later concluded were unauthorized. Even Iran-Contra didn't get unwound like Rov_Scam's hypothesizing: the feds tried and had some legal success to pull back money the executive spent and definitely didn't 'legitimately' have, but never got the money back, there was a much more constrained appropriations interface, and it was a mess in general.
EDIT: on the other hand, this isn't a settlement-settlement; because it's not reviewed by a judge, voiding it has a lot more options available.
I think that -- generally speaking -- settlements of legal claims do not need to be reviewed by a judge to be binding. I'm not sure how this Anti-Weaponization Fund will work, but presumably a claimant completes some kind of documentation; at some point the fund offers the person money; and, if the claimant accepts the offer, he signs some kind of release. Presumably if the claimant supplied false (and important) information in connection with his documentation, that would potentially be a basis for the government to take the position that the settlement is void and the money needs to be paid back. Absent that, I'm skeptical that there's much precedent for trying to recoup the money on the ground that the underlying settlement was collusive; or ultra vires; or whatever. So that if a future administration tried to do so, it could reasonably seen as escalation.
Here's a question: When the Trump administration cut off funding for a lot of USAID recipients, did the US also file lawsuits to recoup monies already paid? If not, that's another area for possible future escalation.
A purely contractual settlement has the defendant and claimant sign an agreement to end the lawsuit; it is remedied by bringing a court case again (though the second time, it's for breach of contract). These don't have to be reviewed by a judge unless there is a breach, and the standard is very generous toward the non-breaching party.
A judicially enforced settlement is one that's been presented to and accepted by a judge, and formally become part of the settlement of the case. These have to be reviewed first, but they become res judicata and a breach of the settlement terms can be punished with contempt.
As far as I can tell, no. The closest I can find was the big EPA fund held at CitiBank, but there it was still an attempt to go for funds awarded to Citibank rather than delivered to the grantees.
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