By Jan Wolfe
Feb 11 (Reuters) – Four Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit on Wednesday that seeks to block the Trump administration from terminating $600 million in public health funding.
In a complaint filed in federal court in Chicago, the states — California, Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota — said they were being unlawfully subjected to “devastating funding cuts to basic public health infrastructure based on political animus and disagreements about unrelated topics such as federal immigration enforcement.”
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said on Monday that the grants are being terminated because they do not reflect the agency’s priorities. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.
The grant funding, administered through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is used to monitor health threats, respond to disease outbreaks, and plan for public health emergencies. The affected programs include those supporting HIV prevention and surveillance.
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly attempted to withhold funding from Democratic-led states, though the cuts have been blocked by lower court judges.
A judge last month temporarily blocked the Trump administration from freezing access by five Democratic-led states to more than $10 billion of federal funds for childcare and family assistance based on what the administration said were concerns about fraud.
Trump last month warned so-called “sanctuary cities or states” that he would begin halting funding in February, saying their policies foment “fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come.”
The New York Post first reported last week that Trump’s budget office had instructed the Department of Transportation and the CDC to claw back more than $1.5 billion from a group of Democratic-led states.
“President Trump is resorting to a familiar playbook,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement. “He is using federal funding to compel states and jurisdictions to follow his agenda. Those efforts have all previously failed, and we expect that to happen once again.”
(Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
