California, other states sue over Trump’s latest cuts to HIV programs

California and three other states sued the Trump administration on Wednesday over its plan to cut $600 million from programs designed to prevent and track the spread of HIV, including in the LGBTQ+ community — arguing the move is based on “political animosity and disagreements over unrelated topics such as federal immigration enforcement, political protests and clean energy.”

“This action is illegal,” attorneys for California, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota said in a complaint filed in federal court in Illinois against President Trump and several of his officials.

Funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been allocated to disease control programs in all four states, through California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office said his state faced “the largest share” of the cuts.

This includes $130 million owed to California under a Public Health Infrastructure Block Grant, which the state and its local public health departments use to fund their public health workforce, monitor the spread of disease and respond to public health emergencies, Bonta’s office said.

“President Trump … is using federal funding to force states and jurisdictions to follow his agenda. These efforts have all failed before, and we expect it to happen again,” Bonta said in a statement.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the named defendants, has repeatedly steered his agency away from evidence-based HIV surveillance and prevention programs over the past year, and the Trump administration has widely attacked federal spending aimed at blue states or allocated to initiatives aimed at the LGBTQ+ community.

The White House justified the latest cuts by saying the programs “promote DEI and radical gender ideology” but offered no further explanation. Health officials said the cuts were to programs that did not reflect the CDC’s “priorities.”

Neither the White House nor Health and Human Services immediately responded to requests for comment.

The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said the budget cuts would derail about $64.5 million intended for 14 county grant programs, leading to “increased costs, more preventable illnesses and deaths,” the department said.

These programs focus on responding to disasters, controlling outbreaks of diseases such as measles and influenza, preventing the spread of diseases such as West Nile, dengue and hepatitis A, monitoring and treating HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, combating chronic diseases such as diabetes and obesity, and supporting community health, the department said.

These reductions would also include about $1.1 million for the department’s National HIV Behavioral Surveillance Project, which focuses on detecting emerging HIV trends and preventing outbreaks.

Dr. Paul Simon, an epidemiologist at the UCLA Fielding School and former chief science officer for the county public health department, said scaling back the program was a “dangerous” and “short-sighted” decision that would leave public health officials in the dark about what’s happening with the disease on the ground.

Significant cuts are also planned for the city of Long Beach, UCLA and nine community health providers that provide HIV prevention services, including $383,000 for the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s community HIV prevention programs, local officials said.

Leading California Democrats spoke out against the cuts. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the move was an illegal attempt by Trump to punish blue states that “will not bow to his extremist agenda.”

“His message to the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV is clear: Their lives are not a priority, political retaliation is,” Padilla said in a statement.

The states argue in the lawsuit that the administration’s decision “singles out certain jurisdictions against them based on a rational purpose related to the goals of any program, but rather on partisan animosity.”

The lawsuit asked the court to declare the cuts illegal and enjoin the administration from implementing them or “engaging in future retaliation with respect to federal funding or other participation in federal programs” based on states exercising sovereign authority in unrelated areas.