CA Sues Trump Admin. For Defunding Medical Research

CALIFORNIA —California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined 21 other attorneys general in a lawsuit Monday against the Trump administration, accusing it of unlawfully cutting medical and public health funding.

“The stakes are especially high here in California. Ours is a state known as a national and global leader in life-saving biomedical research, and I will not allow the Trump Administration to jeopardize the extraordinary work being done right now by scientists, scholars, medical professionals, and other workers.”

The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are also named as defendants in the suit.

The group of state leaders is challenging President Donald Trump's administration for cutting "indirect cost" reimbursements at every institution across the country. Such reimbursements cover expenses for biomedical research and lab and facility costs.

On Friday, the NIH announced it would abruptly slash indirect cost rates to an across-the-board 15 percent rate, which is significantly less than the cost required to perform cutting edge medical research, according to Bonta. California's universities and institutions were given nearly no time to respond, as they took effect Monday. Life-extending clinical trials are expected to be suspended, and layoffs and lab closures are also likely.

The coalition is seeking a court order barring the Trump administration and NIH from implementing the cuts, contending it violates the Administrative Procedure Act and a directive Congress passed during Trump's first term.

The statutory language in the directive restricts the NIH from mandating categorial and indiscriminate changes to indirect cost reimbursements.

The suit is being co-led by the attorneys general of Massachusetts, Illinois and Michigan. The following states joined the group:

• Arizona
• California
• Connecticut
• Colorado
• Delaware
• Hawaii
• Maine
• Maryland
• Minnesota
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Oregon
• Rhode Island
• Vermont
• Washington
• Wisconsin

Already, health officials in the Golden State have expressed frustration with the administration's interference with public health research. There have been more human, avian, and bovine bird flu cases in the Golden State than in any other part of the nation. However, scheduled CDC updates on the spread of bird flu have not been released since the Trump Administration instructed federal health agencies to pause external communication on the president's first day in office, the Washington Post reported.

On Wednesday, the CDC briefly posted data showing apparent cases of a bird flu appearing to spread among between cats and humans in two households, but the report was quickly pulled from the website, according to The New York Times and Washington Post, which kept screengrabs of the data before it was culled from the site.

The data about the bird flu potentially spreading between cats and humans appeared to have been mistakenly buried in a report about the health impact of the Los Angeles wildfires. New developments in the spread of avian flu is a major concern for public health officials in California.