A federal judge on Thursday blocked a Trump administration order slashing $600 million in federal grant funding for HIV programs in California and three other states, finding merit in the states’ argument that the move was politically motivated by disagreements over unrelated state sanctuary policies.
U.S. District Judge Manish Shah, an Obama appointee in Illinois, found that California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota were likely to succeed in arguing that President Trump and other administration officials targeted the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for termination “based on arbitrary, capricious, or unconstitutional rationales.”
Namely, Shah wrote that while Trump administration officials said the programs were cut for breaking with CDC priorities, other “recent statements” by officials “plausibly suggest that the reason for the direction is hostility to what the federal government calls ‘sanctuary jurisdictions’ or ‘sanctuary cities.’”
Shah found that the states had shown they would “suffer irreparable harm” from the cuts, and that the public interest would not be harmed by temporarily halting them — and as a result granted the states a temporary restraining order halting the administration’s action for 14 days while the litigation continues.
Shah wrote that while he may not have jurisdiction to block a simple grant termination, he did have jurisdiction to halt an administration directive to terminate funding based on unconstitutional grounds.
“More factual development is necessary and it may be that the only government action at issue is termination of grants for which I have no jurisdiction to review,” Shah wrote. “But as discussed, plaintiffs have made a sufficient showing that defendants issued internal guidance to terminate public-health grants for unlawful reasons; that guidance is enjoined as the parties develop a record.”
The cuts targeted a slate of programs aimed at tracking and curtailing HIV and other disease outbreaks, including one of California’s main early-warning systems for HIV outbreaks, state and local officials said. Some were oriented toward serving the LGBTQ+ community. California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said California faced “the largest share” of the cuts.
The White House said the cuts were to programs that “promote DEI and radical gender ideology,” while federal health officials said the programs in question did not reflect the CDC’s “priorities.”
Bonta cheered Shah’s order in a statement, saying he and his fellow attorneys general who sued are “confident that the facts and the law favor a permanent block of these reckless and illegal funding cuts.”