Federal judge temporarily blocks Trump’s $600M cuts to public health grants

CHICAGO (CN) — A federal judge late Thursday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from slashing over $600 million in public health grants.

Four Democrat-led states sued the Trump administration Wednesday after the federal government moved to terminate several Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grants for “inconsistency with agency priorities.”

Illinois, California, Colorado and Minnesota filed the 26-page lawsuit in the Northern District of Illinois, arguing the cuts were driven by political animus rather than legitimate policy goals.

“This action is lawless. It violates the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirement of reasoned decision-making, and it exceeds the agencies’ statutory authority,” the states said in the complaint. “Even more fundamentally, it violates basic tenets of our constitutional order.”

At a temporary restraining order hearing Thursday, government attorney Patrick Johnson argued there is no viable legal challenge because the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has its own authority to terminate grants.

"There's, you know, no relief about this directive, whatever form it is, since the grants have already been terminated," Johnson said. "So [there's] no injunction that's going to grant them the relief."

But in a two-page ruling issued late Thursday, U.S. District Judge Manish Shah agreed with the plaintiffs' argument and found the prospective grant cuts unconstitutional.

"The court finds that plaintiffs have established a likelihood of success in demonstrating that defendants have taken final agency action amounting to guidance or directives to review grants awarded to plaintiffs for termination based on arbitrary, capricious, or unconstitutional rationales," Shah, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote. "Therefore, plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claim to set aside that guidance under the Administrative Procedure Act and their claim to enjoin unconstitutional action by defendants."

Since taking office, Trump has repeatedly targeted so-called sanctuary cities, which he views as obstacles to his immigration enforcement agenda. Throughout January, he threatened to cut off federal funding, a promise he reiterated at a Jan. 20 White House press briefing.

“We’re not going to pay sanctuary cities anymore," Trump said. "They can sue us and maybe they’ll win, but we’re not giving money to them anymore as of the beginning of the month."

In the complaint, the states said the administration has repeatedly sought to strip funding from jurisdictions Trump opposes, noting that the Office of Management and Budget spent January compiling a list of grants to cut before notifying Congress on Monday.

The largest grant at risk is the Public Health Infrastructure Grant, a nationwide program launched in 2022 that supports core public health systems and staffing in all 50 states. The states warn that cutting the program, the backbone of federal public health funding, would trigger layoffs of hundreds of essential public health workers.

“Defendants’ notification to Congress is silent as to how 46 out of 50 substantially identical PHIG grants could be compatible with agency priorities, while the remaining four are not,” the states said.

Illinois, California, Colorado and Minnesota use their grant funding in different ways. In Illinois, for example, the grants support lead poisoning prevention programs in 25 local health departments. The states say losing the funding would force Illinois to abandon several multi-year initiatives central to a modern public health system, because state budgets cannot replace the lost federal dollars.

"The result will be preventable deaths, injuries, and needless suffering due to HIV and other disease outbreaks the states can no longer track, lead exposure that the States can no longer mitigate, public health emergencies to which the states are less prepared and equipped to respond, and other core public health dangers that any developed public health system should easily quell," the states wrote in their complaint.

Shah's order temporarily restrains the Trump administration from implementing any of the health grant cuts, and it remains in effect until Feb. 26. The parties are set to meet again for a status hearing on Feb. 18.

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