California Attorney General Rob Bonta recently announced that his office has partnered with a coalition of 22 attorneys general from around the country to sue the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) due to severe “unlawful” funding cuts.
The NIH is the primary government agency that funds medical research in the U.S.
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts. The suit challenges the Trump administration’s cutting of indirect cost reimbursements in programs funded at U.S. research health institutions, such as the University of California (UC) and the California State University (CSU) systems.
AG Bonta and the coalition are seeking a temporary restraining order to stop the Trump Administration from acting on new orders from the president. Trump has created over 200 orders calling for deep budget cuts and other changes in the nation, which have been met with a flurry of lawsuits alleging the orders violate the U.S. Constitution in numerous ways, including First and Fifth Amendment rights to due process, equal protection, a free press, and many more. To date, at least 29 court rulings have put a pause on many of these actions while the legal challenges work their way through the judicial system, according to reporting in the New York Times.
In a statement about the new lawsuit, Attorney General Bonta said that the Trump cuts are “unlawfully decimating funds that support cutting-edge medical and public health research at universities and research institutions across the country.” Bonta’s press release explains that this attempt to cut indirect cost cuts would negatively impact every health institution and university. He additionally pointed out that the current agreements were painstakingly negotiated with the federal government prior to Trump’s second presidency starting in 2025.
“We are suing President Trump and his administration because they are once again violating the law. Let’s be clear about what they are seeking to do now: they want to eviscerate funding for medical research that helps develop new cures and treatments for diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s,” said Attorney General Bonta. “The stakes are especially high here in California. Ours is a state known as a national and global leader in life-saving biomedical research, and I will not allow the Trump Administration to jeopardize the extraordinary work being done right now by scientists, scholars, medical professionals, and other workers.”
In court documents, the plaintiffs allege, “Effectively halting research to cure and treat human disease will directly impact the well-being of the Plaintiff states’ citizens, who are the beneficiaries of research creating treatments, such as modern gene editing, vaccines such as flu vaccines, and cures for diseases like cancer, infectious diseases, and addiction.”
Indeed, the CDC, whose website has already been dramatically streamlined with numerous health tabs eliminated by the Trump administration, reports that currently there are “29 million illnesses (flu or norovirus), 370,000 hospitalizations, and 16,000 deaths from flu so far this season.” In Texas, due to numerous families deciding not to vaccinate their children for measles, the illness once eradicated in the U.S. has now been reported in nearly 100 cases, with 77 children and teens under 17 suffering. Next door in New Mexico, the last official count currently is that nine people are ill with measles, and the numbers are rising.
Measles is highly contagious and can be deadly. Pockets of the U.S. population have been trending toward not vaccinating children due to misinformation about vaccine safety, and it is expected mumps and rubella, which are part of the same vaccination protocol as measles, will also experience outbreaks. In total, the measles vaccine has saved over 90 million lives over the past half-century.
Currently in the U.S., the famous lawyer and author Robert Kennedy Jr. is the new Secretary and Human Services. Kennedy is equally famous for his vocal and controversial stance as an anti-vaccine activist, a label he disputes.
Attorneys argue in the new lawsuit that the Trump Administration's action is illegal because it violates numerous parts of the Administrative Procedure Act. The coalition led by Bontas states that “the action is arbitrary and capricious and violates a directive Congress passed during President Trump’s first term to fend off his earlier proposal to drastically cut research reimbursements. That statutory language, still in effect, prohibits the NIH from requiring categorial and indiscriminate changes to indirect cost reimbursements.”
Attorney General Bonta is joined in the lawsuit by the attorneys general of: Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin.
