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MANHATTAN (CN) — New York Attorney General Letitia James and 19 other state attorneys general announced Monday that they are suing the Trump administration and its Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for gutting the agency’s manpower.
In March, Kennedy unveiled a dramatic restructuring of the HHS pursuant to President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative. Per Kennedy’s plan, the department’s headcount was to be slashed by roughly 20,000 and its 28 agencies would be consolidated into 15 — all in the name of reducing federal spending and boosting efficiency.
“This administration is not streamlining the federal government; they are sabotaging it and all of us,” Attorney General James said in a statement Monday announcing the lawsuit. “When you fire the scientists who research infectious diseases, silence the doctors who care for pregnant people, and shut down the programs that help firefighters and miners breathe or children thrive, you are not making America healthy — you are putting countless lives at risk.”
Kennedy “refused to undertake this restructuring legally or carefully,” the multistate coalition claims. They say that the directive will actually have a “disastrous” effect on the United States’ ability to tackle public health crises and care for some of the nation’s most vulnerable.
“In its first three months, this administration systematically deprived HHS of the resources necessary to do its job,” the states argue in their lawsuit, filed in Rhode Island federal court. “Their plan escalated significantly on March 27, 2025, when HHS announced it would send termination notices to 10,000 HHS employees and shutter dozens of agencies as part of Secretary Kennedy’s directive to ‘Make America Healthy Again.’”
On April 1, those termination notices were distributed, causing turmoil in the department as its offices scrambled to function amid the sudden layoffs, the states said.
“There was no one to answer the phone, factories went into shutdown mode, experiments were abandoned, trainings were cancelled, site visits were postponed, application portals were closed, laboratories stopped testing for infectious diseases such as hepatitis, and partnerships were immediately suspended,” the states claim.
Among the impacted programs was a potential bird flu vaccination from the Food and Drug Administration. The states say that the layoffs caused the FDA to miss a vaccine application deadline and axe a critical test for the bird flu virus, causing the testing program to be suspended for the rest of 2025.
“The federal government has cut lab capacity so much that they have all but stopped testing for measles in the middle of an unprecedented measles outbreak,” James said at a Monday press conference.
The cuts also left the World Trade Center Health Program with no doctors to certify new illnesses for coverage, violating requirements under the Zadroga Act that 9/11 survivors receive federal care.
“They promised they would not touch the program. They lied,” 9/11 first responder Gary Smiley said at the press conference with James. “This administration, Elon Musk and everybody that’s been involved has lied to the 9/11 community and has done damage that is just irreparable.”
Smiley said that the harm now facing roughly 141,000 first responders is “reprehensible,” as it has left many to wonder whether they will be able to get their cancer diagnoses certified for care or pay for their post-traumatic stress disorder therapy.
“The fear alone that your care will be denied, that you won’t be able to go to your therapist, is going to lead to self-harm and is going to lead to people taking their own lives,” Smiley said.
A spokesperson for HHS told Courthouse News that the department doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
The states are seeking a preliminary and permanent injunction to prevent the Trump administration from implementing Kennedy’s directive, and allowing for numerous department-led trials, experiments and studies to resume as planned.
Joining New York in Monday’s lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.
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