States Sue HHS to Try to Stop Withholding of $600 Million in Public Health Grants

Four states on Feb. 11 asked a federal court to stop the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) from cutting $600 million in public health funding.

The Trump administration has targeted the states—California, Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota—because of “political animus and disagreements about unrelated topics such as federal immigration enforcement, political protest, and clean energy,” the states said in a 26-page lawsuit, filed with the U.S. District Court in northern Illinois.

President Donald Trump has said that agencies should stop paying sanctuary cities, and the Office of Management and Budget has said that it directed health officials to withdraw the $600 million from the states.

“Starting February 1, we’re not making any payments to sanctuary cities,” Trump said during a Jan. 13 speech in Detroit, referencing jurisdictions whose policies prohibit local authorities from cooperating with federal immigration agents.

Trump said that such cities “do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens, and it breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come. So we’re not making any payment to anybody that supports sanctuary.”

HHS, which does not comment on litigation, said in a notice to Congress that the grants are “inconsistent with agency priorities,” according to the filing.

HHS provided a link to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention webpage that lists the CDC’s priorities, which include modernizing public health infrastructure and not supporting illegal immigration, the lawsuit states.

Most of the funding in question goes to the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, which funds public health departments to recruit and train workers, improve organizational systems, and modernize data infrastructure.

The grants “are the backbone of Plaintiff States’ public health infrastructure,” the states said in a motion for a temporary restraining order while the case advances. “Without them, Plaintiff States will have diminished capacity to track disease outbreaks, maintain and improve their data systems, and collect basic public health data.”

State officials also say they would be forced to lay off hundreds of workers if funding is pulled.

“Many of the other state grants slated for termination fund disease surveillance, outbreak tracking, and other data collection—and that lost data, too, will be impossible to replace, leaving months-long or years-long gaps in the information Plaintiff States use to detect outbreaks, identify injury trends, and respond to emerging public health threats,” the motion stated.

The targeting directive is arbitrary, capricious, and unconstitutional, violating federal law and the U.S. Constitution, officials said in the filing.

“The Trump administration is unlawfully trying to stop our own tax dollars from coming back to Minnesota to improve health and well-being across our state,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said in a statement.

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said, “Illinois will not stand by idly as Trump illegally cancels the Congressionally-allocated funding we are owed.”

Because the funding is due to end as early as Feb. 12, the states requested the court halt the cuts by 11 a.m on that date.