Arizona joins lawsuit over Trump administration plan to slash public health funding

Arizona is one of 23 states suing the Trump administration over plans to terminate more than $11 billion in public health grants.

The coalition of state attorneys general filed the suit Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island. They are seeking a temporary restraining order to immediately block U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to claw back funding related to COVID–19 that had been promised to states.

It is the eighth lawsuit against the Trump administration that Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes has joined.

“If these cuts are allowed to happen, a number of critical public health officials are going to have to be laid off, and the losers in all of this will be Arizonans,” Mayes told KJZZ.

The Arizona Department of Health Services has said Arizona stands to lose more than $190 million in grant funding from the cuts, which would result in 269 contracts with county public health departments, tribes, universities and other organizations being canceled. Mayes said programs for disease surveillance, vaccinations and rural health outreach are at risk of being shut down.

The Trump administration has said the cuts are warranted.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago," the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement last week.

But Mayes argued that the grant funding was never tied to the end of the pandemic. And she said the Trump administration does not have the legal authority to stop the funding.

“Congress did appropriate this funding,” Mayes said. “It approved this funding in a series of laws, and those grants cannot be canceled mid-cycle, and that’s what’s happening.”