Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell says her office came prepared for what she’s calling “Trump 2.0,” challenging the president’s administration on a host of issues during its first 100 days. Suing the federal government over a dozen times now, Campbell says she and other AGs will continue to push back on what she calls “chaos and confusion.”
“Our lawsuits are working,” Campbell told reporters on Friday during a virtual press conference. “We're protecting federal funding, our public health of our residents, and even birthright citizenship.”
For the past three months, AG Campbell has involved herself in multiple court challenges seeking to halt or undo policy changes called for by the Trump administration.
Such changes have included drastically reducing federal funding via research grants, clawing back millions in “unspent” pandemic relief dollars intended for schools and more.
A state laden with research universities and hospitals, plus one of the top education systems in the country, Massachusetts has been lopsidedly affected by some of the policy shifts.
Campbell says she was prepared for the disruption, but the immediate scale was unexpected.
“What we could not have expected was that the volume of the attacks from the federal administration - on the rule of law, on immigrants, vulnerable communities, state economies -would be much greater and quicker than the first term,” she said. “Trump. 2.0 is different from Trump 1.0 and yet, AGs have kept pace because we were prepared.”
The Trump administration has sought to implement a number of cuts across the federal government to reduce spending, with many stemming from executive orders, including one that led to what was effectively a federal funding freeze.
The AG has become involved in or led at least 14 lawsuits so far. Campbell acknowledges such efforts “won’t win every fight,” but have achieved some meaningful progress, including injunctions.
One in particular she’s proud of is the rapid response to a change in National Institutes of Health funding.
“We filed a lawsuit immediately … to protect access to funding that would supply not only human capital, but equipment and other things that were necessary for folks to continue their groundbreaking biomedical research. This is research that has proven not only to save lives, but clinical trials for cancer: adult cancer, pediatric cancer - you name it,” she recounted. “With the action by the Trump administration [occurring] on a Friday night, our office mobilized to draft a lawsuit to file in court that Monday, and within hours, we had an injunction stopping them from proceeding.”
In February, the NIH announced that in order to reduce millions in research grant funding being spent on "indirect costs," such as rent and administrative overhead, it would lower the maximum indirect cost rate research institutions can charge the government.
That meant a 15 percent cap – way down from the 60 percent or more some were said to be charging, potentially saving up to $4 billion annually.
It was also a steep drop with little warning that would mean drastic cuts and scaling back in Massachusetts, which received some $3.5 billion in funding from the NIH last year.
Campbell, who is in her first term as AG, says such moves fit a pattern of administration “taking blatantly unlawful actions.”
While some lawsuits seem sector-specific, Campbell says overall, in the face of federal funding being frozen or pulled for a number of programs and subsidies, many suits end up dealing with matters that can affect affordability in the state.
“All of the actions that we're taking, specifically on protecting access to federal funding, absolutely has an effect on the costs and the prices [for] folks here in Massachusetts,” she said. “If we're pushing for billions of dollars - and we get over $20 billion from the federal government for public health efforts, to run our schools, to support our students, our students with special needs, our homeless students - we're fighting, I would say, regularly, to protect access to that funding, because we know it would have a detrimental impact on the bottom lines of families, of households, if, suddenly they would have to come out of pocket to fill the gap of this funding loss and the same thing for our state.”
Notably, within an hour of Friday’s press conference, Campbell’s office announced it was suing the Trump administration again, this time over threats of withholding education funding over DEI initiatives.
It’s another coalition effort –19 attorneys general are involved – and looks to challenge the U.S. Department of Education over what Campbell calls a “threat to withhold federal funding from state and local agencies that refuse to abandon lawful programs and policies related to diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
