California and a coalition of other states continued the Trump administration on Monday to block the scanning cuts at the United States Ministry of Health and Social Services, arguing that they are unconstitutional Americans and endanger.
The trial specifically disputes the Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the directive of March 27 by drawing 10,000 full -time employees, consolidating 28 Department divisions in 15 and closing five of the 10 regional offices, including one in San Francisco. The measures upset a range of crucial services, according to the states, in particular by closing the laboratories monitoring the current epidemic of the country’s measles.
The trial – brought by California Atty. General Rob Bonta and the general prosecutors of 18 other states and the Columbia district – maintains that the cuts are “arbitrary and capricious” and unconstitutional, violating the law on administrative procedure and exceeding “beyond the scope of the presidential power” by usurting the authority of the Congress to appropriate funding for certain government services, said the Bonta office.
“The Trump administration does not have the power to incapacity a department created by the Congress, and it cannot refuse to spend funds that have been assigned by the congress for this department,” Bonta said in a statement. “This is why my colleagues general prosecutors and I translate the Trump administration to justice – HHS is attacked, and we do not defend it.”
The trial asks the courts to declare the illegal cuts, to block or overthrow their implementation and to cancel the layoffs, said the BONTA office. It was one of the two proceedings brought by the Bonta office against the Trump administration on Monday – the second calls into question the new federal restrictions on wind energy.
A health and social services spokesman defended the agency’s actions on Monday, saying that it was carried out in accordance with the law and other federal protections.
Health and social services have previously characterized changes as a “dramatic restructuring” of the agency in accordance with an executive decree of President Trump in February which instructed the government department of the Elon Musk government with “the elimination of waste, bloating and insularity” in federal workforce, including through mass dismissals.
Health and social services have declared that the overhaul would also help to focus on Kennedy’s priorities to “end the chronic disease epidemic by focusing on safe and healthy food, clean water and the elimination of environmental toxins”.
“We are not only reducing bureaucratic spread. We carry out the organization with its main mission and our new priorities in the inversion of the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This department will be more – much more – at a lower cost for the taxpayer.”
Kennedy said that “bureaucracies and HHS become useless and ineffective” over time, “even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent officials” and the overhaul would be “a winner for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves”.
“This is the whole American public, because our goal is to make America again healthy,” he said, repeating a slogan that the Trump campaign resumed after Kennedy suspended his own presidential offer to support Trump in August.
Kennedy was confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Health and Social Services in February in the midst of strong criticisms on the part of the Democrats, who castigated the eccentric scion of the politically corrected Kennedy family as the theorist of the antivaccine conspiracy which, for years, has spread the dangerous, non -scientific beliefs on a multitude of health and virus problems, including HIV Covid-19.
Kennedy has continued to cause an alarm since, in particular by manipulating the country’s measles epidemic, which has swept away in the southwest in recent months where vaccination rates have been late.
Rather than putting pressure for greater vaccination, which turned out to be very effective and safe, Kennedy ordered his department to seek new treatment options. Scientists have ridiculed this decision as a stupid and likely diversion of resources in the face of a serious and fatal threat – which is not necessary, given the effectiveness of the measles vaccine.
In their trial, the States refer to the “history of the rotation of conspiracy theories” of Kennedy and pleading for the dismantling of health and social services, said the Bonta office. Already, its directive reducing the reduction of the agency Cause of damage, paralyzing the support of programs such as Head Start, the implementation of the production of N95 masks and the closure of laboratories that monitor infectious diseases such as measles, said the Bonta office.
The Associated Press reported that the Kennedy cuts seem to have eliminated more than a dozen data collection programs that have followed deaths and diseases across the country.
Congress provided health and social services a budget of $ 1.8 billion in 2024 and adopted various laws that describe its mission, said the Bonta office.
Given a previous takeover, the ministry has lost around 20,000 of its 82,000 employees since the Trump administration, said Bonta office.
States support in their trial that health and social services have fallen into disarray after the dismissal notices left on April 1, thousands of employees were “immediately expelled from their work email, laptops and offices”, and work through the department “suddenly arrested”.
“Throughout the HHS, critical offices have not been able to perform statutory functions. There was no one to answer the phone, the factories went into a stop mode, the experiments were abandoned, the training courses were canceled, the on -site visits were postponed, the application portals were closed, the laboratories were arrested for infectious diseases such as hepatitis and partnerships were immediately suspended, “said the infectious states.
The prosecutors general of Bonta in the trial, the Attorney General of Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
The trial was the 17th tabled by the Bonta office against the Trump administration. The 18th came also on Monday also when California joined 16 other states and the District of Columbia to continue the administration for the cessation of federal approvals for offshore offshore and ononsehore energy projects – a decision which, according to the States, violates the law on administrative procedure and their right to pursue clean energy sources.
California continued the Trump administration separately from the plans of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention aimed at reducing billions of dollars of federal public health subsidies aimed at increasing state resilience to infectious diseases, based on similar arguments concerning the administration exceeding its power to contradict decisions by the congress on federal expenses.
California leaders also expressed their concerns about the planned closure of the San Francisco San Francisco. The former lecturer of the Chamber, Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), said that this decision was “short-sighted” and would have “harmful impacts on our response to public health” and that she “examined all possible avenues to fight back” against the cuts.
California Daily Newspapers
