Trump admin is withholding over $300 billion from pro-trans states. The states are fighting back.https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2026/01/admin-is-withholding-over-300-billion-from-pro-trans-states-the-states-are-fighting-back/ 🔗John Russell (14 Jan 2026)
Twelve states are suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for forcing them to discriminate against transgender people.
On Tuesday, the attorneys general of New York, Rhode Island, California, Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, Vermont, and Washington joined Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield (D) in a lawsuit challenging HHS's "conditioning [of] hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funding on states' agreement to discriminate against transgender people," according to a press release from the Oregon Department of Justice.
"Under a new HHS policy, recipients of federal health, education, and research funding must certify compliance with a presidential executive order that seeks to deny the existence of transgender people and impose rigid, unscientific definitions of sex," the press release states.
On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14168, titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." In addition to declaring that the U.S. would only recognize two sexes (male and female) based on the size of an individual's reproductive cells, the order also instructs federal agencies to "assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote [so-called] gender ideology" — among many other anti-trans directives.
The complaint asserts that HHS's efforts to implement the order's directives violate the U.S. Constitution "by overriding Congress' power of the purse," that the new policy "breaks federal law by attaching vague and retroactive conditions to funding, and violates the Administrative Procedure Act by imposing a major policy change without notice or explanation," according to the Oregon DOJ.
