The Trump administration keeps cutting funding to essential services, and finally, states are fighting back.
Officials from 23 states and Washington, D.C., have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., claiming that the drastic cuts of some $12 billion in public funding aren’t just harmful, they’re unlawful.
According to CNN, states are looking to stop “the administration’s funding cuts that they say will lead to key public health services being discontinued and thousands of health-care workers losing their jobs.”
Cost-cutting at the expense of human life is a common theme of Project 2025 and the Trump administration. Just last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took back $11.4 billion in COVID-19 pandemic response money allocated to state and community health departments.
They also cut $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” HHS said, CNN reports.
“HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”
The states involved in the lawsuit claim that although these funds were allocated during the pandemic, they weren’t specifically intended to cover only COVID-19 care. Much of the funding, they claim, “was to support the public health system in the long term, as well as for pandemic preparedness and certain behavioral health services, including addiction treatment and suicide prevention,” CNN reports.
CNN reports New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose state stands to lose more than $400 million in public health funding, said in a news release, “Slashing this funding now will reverse our progress on the opioid crisis, throw our mental health systems into chaos, and leave hospitals struggling to care for patients.”
Dr. Joseph Kanter, CEO of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, told CNN that the funding was approved by Congress and was set to create stronger responses for measles outbreaks and H5N1 bird flu.
“This funding was appropriated by Congress and obligated to health departments with work plans, budgets, and timelines approved by federal agencies,” Kanter said in a statement.
“With congressional and executive branch support, these funds were being used to modernize data systems, bolster laboratory capacity, improve electronic case reporting of time-sensitive infectious disease outbreaks, improve H5N1 and measles testing, and enhance biomedical terrorism preparedness, to name just a few examples,” he said. “We worry the abrupt loss of these activities will impair states and territories in their ability to respond to current and future threats.”
The lawsuit claims the Trump administration doesn’t have jurisdiction to rescind funding that was already approved by Congress, but that has never stopped the Trump administration — which seems to function under the credo: “It’s better to do what I want, then to make sure it’s legal.”
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