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23 DEM AGS THINK THEY’VE CRACKED THE CODE TO FIGHTING TRUMP  
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Rachel Bluth, Melanie Mason
February 27, 2025
Politico
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_ Democratic state attorneys general have been planning their
lawsuits for a year. _

Supporters raise signs after a press conference by New York Attorney
General Letitia James and Connecticut Attorney General William Tong
outside Manhattan federal court, Feb. 14, 2025, in New York., Yuki
Iwamura/AP

 

The resistance meets daily on Microsoft Teams.

The country’s 23 Democratic state attorneys general log on at 4pm ET
for a thirty-minute confidential video chat to coordinate their plans
for pushing back against the Trump administration. They share updates
on the seven cases they have moving through federal courts and argue
about whether to treat Elon Musk as a lawful arm of the government or
an uncredentialed interloper to it. They plot where to respond next,
leveraging timezone differences to expand the workday.

The American left has floundered during Trump 2.0. The mass protests
of 2017 have not emerged, and donors to progressive causes are not
giving the way they did then, either. Democratic congressional
minorities have been cowed by Trump’s assertions of executive power,
while many of the governors who stand as their party’s leading
figures are cautious about provoking fights with the president. In
confronting Trump, elected officials have largely yielded to labor
unions and advocacy organizations.

Then there are the attorneys general, who see themselves as the last
backstop between the people and the president. Their multi-state
lawsuits have temporarily stopped the president from revoking
birthright citizenship, freezing federal funding and cutting off money
for medical research. This week, they filed their sixth amicus brief
in an action against the Trump administration, with 23 attorneys
general signing on to argue the importance of the Affordable Care Act.
The US Department of Justice declined a request for comment on that
suit, or others it is defending.

“Right now in the United States, the Democratic AGs are the only
group of people who are united and working to prevent some of these
unconstitutional actions from continuing,” Hawaii attorney general
Anne Lopez boasted in an interview.

Their work reflects an upgrade from Trump 1.0, when Democratic state
officials collaborated but in an improvised, reactive fashion, with
plaintiffs sometimes coming together with only a few hours’ notice.
They notched key legal victories then, but were driven by caution as
they feared undermining each other’s cases with conflicting rulings
in different courts.

This year, the attorneys general are executing on a plan they worked
to develop for a year before Trump’s return to the White House,
according to interviews with more than half of the Democratic
attorneys general, former holders of the office and their staff.
Coming together to respond to Trump’s policy blitzkrieg after it
began, they say, would have represented coming together too late.

For many of them responding to Trump has become a full-time job, on
top of their other constitutional duties. All worry they will need to
ask their legislatures for money and more muscle to keep up their
national work against Trump without compromising the other work they
do investigating Medicaid fraud or suing tobacco companies.

“We talk each and every day these days, and you’d think we start
to get tired of it, but we’ve just grown closer over time,” said
Kathy Jennings, Delaware’s attorney general. “And in the next four
years, we’re going to grow _very_ close.”

The brief bank

Bob Ferguson jotted down notes as his car navigated the streets of
Seattle, the hometown where he worked at a large corporate law firm
before embarking on a political career. Ferguson had attended
Democratic Attorneys General Association meetings all over the
country, typically upbeat events swarmed by lobbyists eager for face
time with some of the country’s most powerful state-level
law-enforcement and regulatory officials.

The February 2024 meeting represented a special moment for Ferguson as
he began the final year of his third term as Washington’s attorney
general. He was running for governor and, win or lose, would depart
his office as the country’s last surviving Democratic attorney
general from the start of Trump’s first presidency.

The host state’s attorney general is traditionally granted a
speaking slot at the meeting, and Ferguson wanted to use his to
deliver his colleagues a grave warning: They didn’t know what was
coming.

He wandered the stage at the Grand Hyatt as he spoke, microphone in
hand as he evoked the chaotic early months of 2017, when a rookie
president’s stream-of-consciousness policymaking trampled on
civil-rights protections and the separation of powers.

Even though the 2024 election was still nine months away, Ferguson
implored them, it was past time to start preparing for the cases they
would file if Trump returned to office. He recalled the work his
office did throughout 2016, when Ferguson responded to Trump’s
campaign-trail provocation about banning Muslims from entering the
United States by prepping a constitutional challenge, just in case.
When Trump did issue such an order a week into his term, Ferguson’s
office was able to file a brief against the policy within three days.

“Whatever he is saying or articulating on the campaign trail,”
Ferguson told the assembled attorneys, “assume he’s going to do it
— no matter how outlandish it may be — and prepare for that.”

The speech was part pep talk, part lecture on appellate tactics. The
most important guidance Ferguson had to share was about resources;
attorneys general needed to begin now asking their states for the
money to hire more lawyers, he insisted. They had to be prepared for
January 20, because the president would be. Last time, Trump’s work
was often sloppy, making for easier arguments. Don’t count on that
this time around, he said.

A few attorneys general volunteered immediately to start doing
research, drafting motions and working on arguments. They took broad
issue categories back to their individual states — immigration,
reproductive health, the environment, voting rights — and laid out
the criteria they would use to distribute assignments throughout the
year: Who has bandwidth? Who has expertise? Who is being harmed?

 “There was going to be a need for coordinated action, making sure
that we were not caught flat-footed,” said Maine’s Aaron Frey.
“It allowed us to be thinking about what it is that was going to be
important for our states.”

In Sacramento, Rob Bonta had been preparing to take on more national
cases since 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned _Roe v.
Wade_. A draft challenge to a potential federal abortion ban was filed
in a “brief bank” that Bonta maintained in anticipation of
hypothetical scenarios his office could one day face.

The brief bank grew after the Seattle meeting. Thinking in outlines,
Bonta and his growing litigation staff worked out the subheads, the
ways Trump could attack under each one: military interventions, budget
maneuvers, revoking federal waivers and pulling payments.

Unlike Ferguson, who had had to speculate about what Trump’s
campaign rhetoric might look like when translated into policy, Bonta
and his colleagues had a roadmap. They studied Project 2025, a
sprawling set of policy proposals from the conservative Heritage
Foundation that would dramatically re-envision the federal government.

The state attorneys general — including from the District of
Columbia — began speaking weekly throughout the summer and fall to
update one another of their progress, using the time to order their
priorities and determine the limitations of their powers.

“I think there was a collective recognition that we wanted to
approach things differently,” said Rhode Island’s Peter Neronha,
who caught the last two years of Trump’s term and has served as
attorney general since. “We knew we would have to come up with a
process by which everyone could and would participate.”

Democratic attorneys general didn’t invent multistate suits.
Bipartisan collaborations have been a staple of attorneys general’s
work going after tobacco companies, opioid manufacturers and social
media companies.

Recently they have become a favored tool for state officials banding
together on partisan lines to take on a president of the other party.
Democratic attorneys general from 11 states, Washington DC and two
cities signed onto a Massachusetts-initiated suit against George W.
Bush’s administration over its approach to carbon emissions.
Republican attorneys general from 25 states joined a Florida-led
challenge to Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act. (Both cases
ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court.)

Having all the states hop on the same case makes it easier to show a
national impact, and make the case for a national solution, said David
Levine, a professor at UC Law San Francisco. “You don’t run the
risk that you get different outcomes in different courts that need to
be litigated even more,” Levine said.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta discusses the California
Department of Justice's efforts to protect rights of the state's
immigrant communities at a news conference at the San Francisco Public
Library's Bernal Heights branch in San Francisco, Dec. 4, 2024. | Jeff
Chiu/AP

Even though Democrats recognized the wisdom of joining forces to
oppose Trump in 2017, the 23 members of the party who occupied
attorneys general offices were not well-organized to do so. Sometimes
they banded together by the dozen, sometimes going out alone or in
groups of two or three.

“It was more ad hoc than I think it is today,” said George Jepsen,
Connecticut’s attorney general during the first Trump presidency.

When Trump issued his ban on travel from seven majority-Muslim
countries, three different lawsuits emerged from attorneys general.
Washington and Minnesota filed a case challenging the first order,
Hawaii followed with a second lawsuit once Trump amended his first
travel ban, while Virginia and New York intervened on behalf of
individuals who had been blocked at airports.

“It was very reactionary and stressful, we were seeing these orders
coming out and trying to get on the phone and figure out what the heck
everybody was going to do, “ said Hawaii’s former Attorney General
Doug Chin.

“The fear was that — and I remember it being expressed back then
— was that we had to think very hard about each one, because we
didn’t want a ruling that would somehow box in everyone else.”

By summer, they had established a framework for developing multistate
suits they could all get behind. They had figured out who had the most
experience in which courts, and which venues could be the best to file
in.

“I guess one of the good things about the summer slumps,”
Maine’s Frey said. “We had time to get ready and figure out how
we’re going to work together, figure out how we can maximize
resources.”

Where Project 2025 was specific, they prepped tailor-made cases that
all the states could sign onto. Where it was vague, they read up on
the arguments that had been successful in impeding Trump’s
first-term agenda.

Early work was divided by who could afford to work on it. In many
cases, that meant the heavy lifting fell upon California’s
5,600-person staff and New York’s 2,400, including 700 just as
assistant attorneys general.

Lawyers were polishing a brief on birthright citizenship even before
Trump was sworn in. The states decided to invite San Francisco to join
as a litigant to harken back to Wong Kim Ark, a native of the city’s
Chinatown whose 1898 Supreme Court appeal affirmed that 14th Amendment
applied to anyone born in the United States.

By November, the brief bank was bulging, occupying ever more time for
government lawyers from Augusta to Honolulu. New Jersey Attorney
General Matthew Platkin asked his department’s lawyers if they
wanted to help with pre-election preparation, knowing that their work
could be rendered irrelevant if Kamala Harris ended up victorious.

“I said, ‘This is purely volunteer, nobody has to do this, we
can’t pay you any more,’” he recalled recently. “Over fifty
lawyers signed up not knowing who was going to win that election,
because they were so concerned.”

On Election Night, Bonta emerged from a half-empty ballroom in a
downtown Los Angeles hotel where California Democrats had hoped to
fête their native daughter winning the White House.

Instead, as dejected lawmakers and labor leaders streamed into the
hallway, Bonta’s mind turned to the year’s worth of planning he
had hoped would “gather dust” after a Harris win. He and his
colleagues, he said, had strategized down to the detail of which
courts to file in, the virtues of facing state versus federal judges,
and how to ensure their cases would have standing to take on Trump.

“If he violates the law — as he has said he would, as Project 2025
says he will,” Bonta said, “then we are ready.”

Time to file

On Inauguration Day, executive orders came flying off White House
shelves by the dozen. They directed the federal government to make it
easier to drill on federal lands, withdraw from international
agreements, end diversity programs, change the legal definition of sex
and alter the names of geographical features.

Among the attorneys general, there was a sense of shock at the speed
with which he moved and how reckless some of the orders seemed. But
they also knew they had spent the past year “trying to map out a
list of areas where we might see massive policy changes and things
that are illegal,” said Nick Brown, who in November was elected to
succeed Ferguson as head of Washington’s attorney general’s
office.

They spoke every few hours that day, divvying up lawsuits by who had
standing, who had expertise, who had staff. If a brief had already
been started, what’s the latest? Where would they file? Who is
writing the press release template?

“As you can imagine, everybody is the chief legal officer of their
respective state, so everybody is used to being in charge,” said
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul. “When you’re working
collectively on something there’s a desire for everyone to have a
leadership role, but you have to put that aside sometimes in the
interest of working together.”

One day later, they filed their first two cases. In Massachusetts, 19
states delivered their well-planned response to a Trump order denying
citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants.

It springboarded off cases from the last Trump administration, where
attorneys general successfully stopped Trump’s attempts to change
census and asylum policies by arguing it was a breach of the
Administrative Procedure Act.

“They had a way to articulate what the state’s interest was,
because that’s the main hurdle you have to get over,” said Levine,
who now teaches the case in his law-school classes. “You can’t
just sue because you don’t like what he’s doing.”

Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul talks to reporters during a
Democratic attorneys general conference in Los Angeles on Feb. 11,
2025. | Damian Dovarganes/AP

Hours after that, Oregon, Arizona and Illinois filed their own suit in
Washington, which would later include three pregnant mothers who
feared their children would be born stateless, another way to show the
harm of the order.

“It wasn’t any strategic thing,” said Illinois’ Attorney
General Kwame Raoul, who filed in the West Coast group. “It happens
sometimes, where one AG may want to file in their state for a
particular reason and another group may do it elsewhere. We’re
trying as much as possible to minimize that and work together.”

On January 27, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget issued a
temporary government-wide funding freeze across the board, sending
state and local programs into chaos. The attorneys general had not
predicted the memo’s specifics, but had spent the prior year getting
language ready for when Trump’s actions inevitably bumped up against
Congress’s power of the purse.

“We had to get that filed quickly, so we leveraged the West Coast
offices,” said Rhode Island’s Neronha. “It’s only a 24-hour
day, but when you’re working overnight, you get three extra hours
when you can get the West Coast teams online and our folks can get a
little sleep.”

A day later, all 23 states filed a suit in Rhode Island to block the
memo’s implementation, using the same separation-of-powers argument
successful in 2020 when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals prevented
Trump from redirecting Pentagon funds for border-wall construction.
Only Congress, the attorney generals’ brief argued, had the power to
appropriate money.

Democratic state officials were not the only plaintiffs emerging to
sue the new president. The AFL-CIO challenged Trump’s changes to the
civil service, the ACLU to protect access to gender-affirming care,
and the City of Baltimore over the shuttering of the Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau. The attorneys general followed days after
each suit with supportive amicus briefs signed by 23 states.

But states are in a unique position unavailable to labor unions and
outside groups. Their suits are essentially class-actions on behalf of
all their constituents, informed by the full range of concrete harms
only a state government is positioned to document. On February 10, 22
of the states sued over cuts to the National Institutes of Health. It
was filed in Massachusetts, but is filled with details on which
programs at the University of Wisconsin are being the most impacted.

“Making sure that information is being included and considered as
part of these cases is what I see as sort of a key role for us and for
other states,“ said Wisconsin’s Attorney General Josh Kaul.

Ferguson and other veterans of the Trump 1.0 suits had warned their
successors to gird for chaos. Few of them, however, expected that
chaos would come at the hands of a techo-mogul with a hyperactive
social media feed and seemingly unfettered access to the inner
workings of the federal government.

“Who could predict that this billionaire, the richest man in the
world, comes in out of nowhere and gets the blessing of the president
to go into our institutions and invade people’s privacy?” Jennings
told reporters in February.

Pushing back on the Department of Government Efficiency’s actions
required the attorneys-general to agree on a shared view of Elon Musk.
Should they treat him as a mouthpiece for the president, giving them
another way to go after Trump? Or was Musk acting in a way that
violated the law himself?

By mid-February, the states had decided to work both angles at once.
One coalition led by New York sued Trump, accusing the Department of
Government Efficiency of violating citizens’ privacy. Days later, a
second group led by New Mexico went after Musk himself, for wielding
too much power for someone who was never confirmed by the Senate.

“It’s important that individuals understand that there are
co-equal branches of law that need to be respected, and that states,
again, have a unique responsibility to ensure that the Constitution is
followed,” New York attorney general Letitia James said ahead of a
hearing in the privacy case.

The attorneys general were encouraged to see Musk’s influence
animating the general public in a way few other issues had in the
flood-the-zone early days of Trump 2.0. Jennings said her office
received more constituent phone calls voicing concern about DOGE than
anything else in her six-year tenure.

“You ask the AGs and they’re going to tell you the same thing,”
she said. “Our phones were flooded. This hit home to people.”

John Suthers, who as Colorado’s Republican attorney general joined
in on a challenge to Obamacare while saying no to other multistate
suits, said in their rush to file anti-Trump lawsuits Democrats could
be falling victim to legal groupthink.

“A lot of these folks aren’t being good lawyers as opposed to good
politicians,” Suthers said. “It’s probably great politics to be
suing the president for waking up in the morning but it’s certainly
not good law.”

The zoom where it happens

High above the schlocky tourist traps of Hollywood Boulevard, the
Democratic Attorneys General Association convened this month for its
first in-person confab since Trump’s inauguration. Attendees reveled
in their early legal victories while navigating a marathon multi-day
schedule of sessions on weighty topics like how to respond if Trump
defied a court order.

Amid bleak talk of constitutional crises, the attendees’ mood was
lightened by the easy familiarity of comrades that have bonded in
trench warfare. They greeted each other with inscrutable inside jokes
— which they declined to explain to an inquiring reporter — and
praised their lesser-known talents, like the joke-telling skills of
Michigan’s Dana Nessel, a former stand-up comedian, or the singing
voice of Nevada’s Aaron Ford.

The good vibes came, in part, from seeing their colleagues out of the
confines of a Zoom screen where they began meeting daily after
Trump’s inauguration. Their staffs talk every day, as well, clearing
up disagreements and fine-tuning strategy, to keep the calls from
running over their scheduled thirty minutes. (The participants have a
“common interest agreement,” where everything that is said is
privileged and confidential. Outside groups, including those whose
cases are backed by the states, are not invited to join.)

But there are fears nationwide about burning staff out, and sharing
time and resources to avoid it. Behind every 50-page brief that makes
it to federal court are hours and hours of time with lawyers and legal
professionals to draft and research. Outside firms that were eager to
volunteer pro-bono hours during Trump’s first term have largely kept
their distance from the states’ efforts this time around.

Smaller states are expanding their operations to play a larger role in
the litigation. In Olympia, the 850-lawyer staff is 50 percent bigger
than it was when Ferguson started; he had added a civil rights
division, environmental protection division and a complex litigation
division to his office. In Annapolis, a new six-person “federal
accountability unit” has been launched.

“The cavalry is on the way,” said Maryland Attorney General
Anthony Brown. “I anticipate that Maryland will be taking a
leadership role on more cases as soon as we have the bandwidth.”

To mount his suits, California sent Bonta an extra $25 million. Rhode
Island’s Legislature gave Neronha more money to staff up. Attorneys
general in Hawaii, Connecticut and elsewhere are hoping their
lawmakers will tap state budgets, too.

“There’s no question our resources are being taxed, I’ve asked
our Legislature for more,” said Colorado Attorney General Phil
Weiser.

But it’s only the beginning. For now the attorneys general will keep
trying to hire more lawyers, and go about the business of their states
while they try to match each executive action they can with a suit of
their own. They’re tending to the drafts in their brief banks but
trying to play it close to the chest.

“So I think that preparation paid off,” said Ferguson, now
Washington’s governor. “I think that that proved to be time well
spent, because they’ve been able to, at this point, match the pace
of the administration.”

_Emily Ngo, Shia Kapos, Matt Friedman and Kelly Garrity contributed to
this article._

_RACHEL BLUTH is the California Health Care Reporter for Politico. She
covers the Legislature, and California politics through a health
policy lens._

_She has covered health care since she was a graduate student in
Maryland
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Her work focuses on the health care safety net, the ways interest
groups affect policy and the inner workings of one of the biggest
industries in the state._

_She is interested in vaccine policy
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health
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health
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_Before joining POLITICO she reported on health policy and politics in
Sacramento with California Healthline and in Washington, D.C. with KFF
Health News. Her work has appeared in the LA Times, New York Times,
Washington Post, NPR, CNN and elsewhere._

_Originally from Albany, New York, Rachel holds a master’s degree
from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of
Maryland and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science and Philosophy
from Binghamton University. She lives in Sacramento with a cat named
Baby._

_MELANIE MASON is a senior political reporter covering California
politics at POLITICO._

_She leads coverage of Los Angeles politics
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the mayoralty of Karen Bass. She is also an expert in the state’s
congressional swing districts
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has closely chronicled its top elected officials from Gov. Gavin
Newsom to Rep. Katie Porter
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Adam Schiff
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_She has over 13 years experience reporting on the people and
institutions that shape the state from bureaus in Sacramento to D.C.
and Los Angeles._

_Melanie co-moderated the first televised debate for the race to
replace former Sen. Dianne Feinstein and is a frequent moderator at
other political panels around the state and beyond._

_Melanie has covered Vice President Kamala Harris’s rise through the
state’s political ranks and was a key part of POLITICO’s 2024
reporting on the RNC and DNC._

_Before joining POLITICO she worked for 12 years at the Los Angeles
Times where she produced award-winning coverage of sexual harassment
in California politics; her work was part of the paper’s 2022
Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of racist leaked audio tapes that
upended L.A. City Hall. She has covered five presidential races, the
2018 and 2026 California governor’s races and numerous congressional
campaigns. She is a graduate of Georgetown University and the
University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism._

_POLITICO is the global authority on the intersection of politics,
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