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Yesterday, Attorney General William Tong joined yet another coalition of attorneys general suing the Trump Administration over its attempts to reign in government spending.

This is not the first lawsuit filed over funding cuts.

This time Tong and his lawfare coalition pals are upset about "a single provision buried in the federal regulations" that is being leveraged to terminate financial assistance for things like DEI, woke gender ideology, the green new deal, and so forth.

The provision was originally enacted in November 2020, near the end of Trump's first term, and stated that a federal grant could be pulled if it “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

The Biden Administration didn't seem to notice the rule change, and it wasn't until Trump started using that rule that democrats, including Tong, became upset. 

According to Tong's coalition, those five words "have formed the basis for much of the Trump Administration’s indiscriminate campaign to unlawfully terminate critical funding expressly authorized by Congress and awarded to states."

“There is no ‘because I don’t like you’ or ‘because I don’t feel like it anymore’ defunding clause in federal law that allows the President to bypass Congress on a whim. Since his first minutes in office, Trump has unilaterally defunded our police, our schools, our healthcare, and more. He can’t do that, and that’s why over and over again we have blocked him in court and won back our funding. We’re taking aim today to stop his repeated illegal misuse of an OMB regulation to punish states and hurt American families,” whined Tong.

The lawsuit argues that the Trump Administration’s decision to invoke the regulation to terminate grants based on their changed agency priorities is unlawful.

The lawsuit argues that, "the regulation does not authorize federal agencies to terminate grants based on changes in agency preferences that occur after a grant is awarded."

The coalition is filing lawsuit against OMB and a number of federal agencies that have relied on this regulation to cut federal funding to states: the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, Labor, and State, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and National Science Foundation.

The coalition is filing suit with a friendly court, the District of Massachusetts, and is seeking a declaratory judgment that the OMB regulation and Defendants’ regulations "do not independently authorize the Trump Administration to terminate funding based on agency priorities that were identified after the grant was awarded."

Alternatively, the coalition wants to vacate the Trump Administration’s decision.

Attorney General Tong joins the attorneys general of New Jersey, Massachusetts, New York, Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia, and the state of Pennsylvania, in filing this lawsuit.

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