States Versus Trump: Legal Challenges Poised to Smash Record

Between the 2024 presidential election and Donald Trump’s inauguration, his transition team lawyers were plotting how to reshape the federal government through a barrage of executive orders.

And Democratic state attorneys general were plotting how to stop them.

Planning on both sides had started months earlier, bolstered by lessons learned from Trump’s first term and by Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint of how the president could consolidate power in a return to the White House.

That playbook “was really scary,” former New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said. “So we felt it would have been irresponsible to not plan for that.”

The concept of states banding together to sue the federal government took root during President Barack Obama’s tenure, picked up in Trump’s first term, held steady under President Joe Biden, and now has exploded, according to data compiled by Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political science professor who studies state attorneys general.

States have teamed up to sue the federal government nearly 100 times since January 2025. That pace, if it continues, is likely to smash the record set during Trump’s first term, when the 100th suit came early in his fourth year, Nolette said.

Partnering to sue enables states to combine resources and legal expertise in challenging the administration’s changes on citizenship, mail-in voting, and environmental regulations, the data shows. Most of the lawsuits are still coursing through the courts.

The trend has elevated the profiles of some attorneys general, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re using it to expand state power, Nolette said. “They’re in favor of state power when it corresponds to their ideological goals, but then they’re in favor of federal power when that aligns with their goals,” he said.

Biden got hit with suits from the Republican side that were frequently led by Texas, while California is largely responsible for the onslaught against Trump from the left.

Fifteen months after his inauguration, California had already filed or joined 67 lawsuits against the federal government, with most joined by one or more states. The suits have protected billions in federal funding, California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s (D) office said. Other states have touted savings and clawbacks of between $1 billion and $15 billion through Trump’s first year back in office.

“My office is the biggest Department of Justice in the nation, outside of the US DOJ,” Bonta told Bloomberg reporters and editors in an interview. “We’re the biggest state, so we tend to raise our hand quite a bit.”

That was the role Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) took during Biden’s tenure. He crowed often about suing the administration and celebrated his 100th such suit in November 2024.

Executive Order Backlash

The attorneys general hold virtual meetings to divvy up tasks and use in-person partisan conventions to identify their targets.

In an early 2024 meeting, Democratic attorneys general began strategizing about two priorities: how to counter post-election litigation from Trump if he lost, as he did in 2020, and what to do about Project 2025 if he won.

“It was really just about making sure we were not caught flat-footed,” Maine Attorney General Aaron M. Frey (D) said.

Democratic attorneys general might have learned lessons from Trump’s first term, but so did Trump.

“The Trump administration this go-round was better prepared to jump into these issues and started issuing executive orders at a different pace than you saw” in the first term, said Paul L. Singer, a former assistant Texas attorney general who’s now a partner at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP.

Since returning to office, Trump has already signed more than 250 executive orders, dozens more than in his first term and at a pace that will easily eclipse Obama and President George W. Bush.

The rise in multistate lawsuits against the federal government is a direct response to presidents’ increased reliance on executive orders, said former Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson.

Attorneys general of the party opposite the president “are stepping into the gaps to make sure that the constitutional lanes of power are kept within the boundaries,” said Peterson, now with Keating O’Gara Law Firm.

Platkin, who served as New Jersey’s attorney general from 2022 until January, called the Trump administration’s reliance on executive orders to implement his agenda a “crisis moment in American history.”

Before leaving office, Platkin took the lead in challenging Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship, filing the suit the morning after the inauguration. With Trump in attendance, the Supreme Court heard arguments in the case this spring and questioned the constitutionality of the order. A ruling is expected within the next two months.

A Brief History

The collective power of the state attorneys general emerged in 1998, when the tobacco industry agreed to pay $206 billion to settle claims with nearly every state.

“Where the federal government sometimes can be like a battleship in trying to get it to turn around and respond to issues of the day, attorneys general are very, very nimble,” retired National Association of Attorneys General Executive Director Chris Toth said.

The tobacco litigation also stands out as an effort that united blue states with red states against powerful companies—a tactic since replicated in litigation against social media platforms and opioid manufacturers and distributors.

Yet in suing the federal government, attorneys general typically stay on their side of the aisle.

During Bush’s tenure, Democratic attorneys general sued to force his administration to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Republican states took a little longer to unite against Obama, according to Nolette, who has studied state attorneys general for about 20 years. But the GOP ultimately started finding targets midway through his first term, when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

That escalated the modern era of partisan multistate litigation, Nolette said.

During Biden’s presidency, six Republican-led states, led by Nebraska, fought to invalidate his attempt to cancel $430 billion in student loan debt. They prevailed in 2023, when the Supreme Court threw out the loan forgiveness program.

Peterson, the Nebraska Republican who left office that year, understood the backlash that was coming from student loan borrowers. But, he quipped, “I wasn’t going to seek reelection.”

‘Largest Law Firm’

While it’s too soon to fully measure the success rate for the Democratic attorneys general against Trump, they’ve seen some success.

California and 18 other states convinced a judge last June to temporarily block Trump’s executive order requiring certain proof of citizenship to vote.

The ruling originally halted the order nationwide before the Trump administration secured a monumental Supreme Court decision largely curbing such broad injunctive applications by a single judge.

In October, a US district judge in Oregon sided with 16 states plus the District of Columbia to temporarily block an order requiring them to eliminate gender ideology content from sex education to avoid losing federal funds.

“When we’re in close coordination as a team, as the largest law firm in American history, we can be very successful,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong (D) told Bloomberg reporters and editors. His state signed on to both cases.

In December, a federal magistrate judge in Oregon ruled for Michigan and 11 other states that modifications to two Federal Emergency Management Agency grant programs harmed local emergency response.

And while the attorneys general themselves have final say on what gets filed in court, they’re also counseled by lawyers in their offices.

Solicitors general play an important part, as do attorneys who work for them and state agencies that could be affected by a given policy.

Former Virginia Solicitor General Michelle Kallen, who worked under Attorney General Mark Herring (D), said presidential actions often sparked conversations by states on whether to sue.

“It was less kind of buddies thinking up ideas and much more structured,” said Kallen, who left state government in 2022 and is now a partner at Steptoe LLP. A lawsuit in Trump’s first term over a policy that restricted certain immigrants from entering the US or staying long-term came together this way, she said.

On the Republican side, Benjamin M. Flowers, a former solicitor general for Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (R), said working together is seamless because a lot of lawyers in state offices know each other from law school, clerking, and membership in groups like the Federalist Society.

“It’s not like we got to the job and had no idea who these people were,” said Flowers, whom Trump has since nominated for the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

‘More Difficult’ Policymaking

There could be a cost to the glut of lawsuits, Nolette said.

“I think it’s made policymaking certainly more difficult on the federal level, for better or for worse,” he said, citing inaction by Congress on immigration and environmental issues while multistate lawsuits on executive policy wind their way through the courts.

Such litigation to kill presidential actions “either delays or kills policy intentionally to try to get to the next term” when the minority party hopes to be in power and reverse decisions of its predecessor, Nolette said.

Trump has canceled more than half of the 162 executive orders signed by Biden.

Peterson, the former Nebraska attorney general, questioned the necessity of so many legal challenges.

“I haven’t looked at all of them,” he said. “I just find that type of volume probably overextends the merit.”

Toth, the former head of the national attorneys general group, said it also reflects a shift in states’ top lawyers focusing less on bread-and-butter enforcement efforts and more on the political whims of their bases.

There’s a place for attorneys general to sue the president’s administration if he has “constitutionally, legally gone off the rails,” Toth said. But “it can go too far, and here’s why—because government is an animal of limited resources.”

—Graphic by Jon Meltzer