State attorneys general are fighting Trump’s agenda — here’s why
Just under an hour’s drive from the White House, Anthony Brown is busy. As Maryland’s Democratic attorney general, Brown is on the front lines of the legal resistance to sweeping changes to policy and law carried out by the Trump administration.
Brown, a retired colonel who served in the U.S. Army for three decades, is part of a coalition of 23 Democratic attorneys general who are filing scores of lawsuits against the federal government — 71, so far, since President Donald Trump returned to office a year ago.
The cases involve immigration enforcement and National Guard deployments, climate change and clean energy, disaster recovery and food assistance, among other issues. The state officials see their legal challenges as the most effective way to combat an administration that they say makes monumental decisions based on the president’s whims.
These are not “abstract legal battles,” Brown told Straight Arrow News.
“What has been most striking is the scope and speed of unlawful actions coming out of the federal government,” Brown said. “This administration has jeopardized funding that educates our students … and tried to take food from the mouths of our most vulnerable families.”
The dozens of cases filed so far are just the beginning.
With three years to go in his second term, Trump is positioned to face more lawsuits from state attorneys general than any other sitting president in U.S. history.
Since the beginning of 2025, the attorneys general have won 43 of 53 resolved cases, according to a tracker from the Progressive State Leaders Committee.
The Department of Justice did not respond to SAN’s request for comment.
Escalating tensions
It’s not unusual for states to sue the federal government, especially states run by officials of the party that doesn’t hold the White House.
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, was his state’s attorney general, for instance, he filed 25 suits between 2013 and 2017 against Democratic President Barack Obama. At the time, this was considered an abnormally high number of cases filed by a single attorney general.
Things have changed.
The number of cases Trump faces in just one year into his second term is nearly as many cases as Obama and Bush received in their entire eight years in office.
Courtrooms have become a battleground for escalating tensions between states and the federal government. Democratic attorneys general filed 155 suits against Trump during his first term, while Republicans filed four.
The courts offer one of the few avenues of recourse for Democrats, with Trump’s fellow Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress and conservatives holding a supermajority on the Supreme Court.
The biggest challenge, Brown said, is protecting “rule of law” and standing up against the growing power of the executive branch.
Critics accuse these legal efforts of being partisan and that state resources are wasted on bias lawsuits.
“Through their partisan-motivated lawsuits against the federal government, state attorneys general are attempting to increase their role in federal constitutional interpretation and federal policymaking more generally, using both law and politics to do so,” Mark Miller, professor and former chair of the Department of Government and International Relations at Clark University, wrote in a law review article. “The danger is that these partisan-motivated lawsuits brought by the state AGs, and often won by them, are increasing the perception that American judges are merely partisan actors in black robes who are working in collusion with other partisan governmental agents to further a partisan agenda. These lawsuits are contributing to the decreasing trust that the American public has in its federal courts, and especially in the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Brown doesn’t see it that way. He said his obligation is to the people of Maryland.
“In November of 2024, right after the election, when I reached out to the governor and the General Assembly and asked for the authorities and the resources to hold the federal government accountable, I made a commitment to them,” Brown told SAN. “I made a commitment to Marylanders that I would not bring an action unless I could essentially connect the dots between the action I bring and what’s important to Marylanders and what they’re talking about around their kitchen table.”
On the frontlines
In late 2024, Brown carved out a niche in his office called the Federal Accountability Unit. The goal was to be able to respond quickly if Brown perceived federal actions as threatening his state.
“When a wave of executive orders and federal policy changes began immediately after January 20, 2025, we were ready, allowing Maryland to act swiftly against those federal actions that caused harm to Maryland and its residents,” said Aleithea Warmack, a spokesperson for Brown.
The Federal Accountability Unit has a budget of $1.2 million a year. But through suing the Trump administration, it has recovered $100 million in federal education funding and $50 million for medical research that had been cut from the University of Maryland Baltimore.
Brown calls the unit — and the lawsuits it files — “an extraordinary return on investment.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
