California and three other states sued the Trump administration Wednesday over its plans to slash $600 million from programs designed to prevent and track the spread of HIV, including initiatives supporting the LGBTQ+ community. The states argued that the move is based on “political animus and disagreements about unrelated topics such as federal immigration enforcement, political protest, and clean energy.”
“This action is lawless,” attorneys for California, Colorado, Illinois, and Minnesota said in a complaint filed in federal court in Illinois against several Trump administration departments and officials, as well as President Trump himself.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had allocated funding to disease control programs in all four states. However, California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office said California faces “the largest share” of the cuts. This includes $130 million allocated 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 disease spread, and respond to public health emergencies.
“President Trump is using federal funding to compel states and jurisdictions to follow his agenda. Those efforts have all previously failed, and we expect that to happen once again,” Bonta said in a statement.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the named defendants, has repeatedly turned his agency away from evidence-backed HIV monitoring and prevention programs in the past year. The Trump administration has broadly attacked federal spending headed to blue states or allocated to initiatives geared toward the LGBTQ+ community.
The White House justified the latest cuts by claiming the programs “promote DEI and radical gender ideology,” but did not provide further explanation. Health officials indicated that the cuts targeted programs that did not reflect the CDC’s “priorities.”
Neither the White House nor Health and Human Services immediately responded to requests for comment on the lawsuit Wednesday.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health warned that the cuts would derail an estimated $64.5 million for 14 different county grant programs, resulting in “increased costs, more illness, and preventable deaths.” These programs focus on disaster response, controlling outbreaks of diseases such as measles and flu, preventing the spread of illnesses like West Nile virus, dengue, and hepatitis A, monitoring and treating HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, combating chronic illnesses such as diabetes and obesity, and supporting community health.
The funding cuts 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’s public health department, described the program cuts as “dangerous” and “shortsighted,” warning that they would leave public health officials in the dark about the real-time status of the disease on the ground.
Considerable cuts are also anticipated for the City of Long Beach, UCLA, and nine community health providers that offer HIV prevention services. This includes $383,000 for the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s community HIV prevention programs, local officials said.
Leading California Democrats have strongly opposed the funding cuts. Senator Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) called the move an unlawful attempt by Trump to punish blue states that “won’t bend to his extremist agenda.”
“His message to the 1.2 million Americans living with HIV is clear: their lives are not a priority, political retribution is,” Padilla said in a statement.
The states argue in their lawsuit that the administration’s decision “singles out jurisdictions for disfavor based not on any rational purpose related to the goals of any program but rather based on partisan animus.”
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the cuts unlawful and to bar the Trump administration from implementing them or “engaging in future retaliatory conduct regarding federal funding or other participation in federal programs” based on the states exercising their sovereign authority in unrelated matters.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2026-02-11/california-other-states-sue-over-trump-administrations-latest-cuts-to-hiv-programs
