This week the Trump administration targeted four Democrat-led states with cuts to funding that had already been authorized by Congress for HIV/AIDS monitoring, STD prevention, and studies assessing health risks for people of color, among other programs.

The White House called them “inconsistent with agency priorities.”

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Trump tried to cut $6.2M in HIV/AIDS funding. A federal court just stopped him.

The funds are administered through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and total roughly $600 million.

Now the four states – California, Minnesota, Illinois and Colorado – are suing the administration for reinstatement of the funds, beginning with seeking a restraining order to stop the cuts from taking effect. The lawsuit asserts cutting the previously authorized funds is illegal and would “irreparably harm the states.”

The cuts are “based on political animus,” the complaint says.

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“President Trump is resorting to a familiar playbook,” Rob Bonta (D), the attorney general of California, said in a statement. “He is using federal funding to compel states and jurisdictions to follow his agenda.”

“Those efforts have all previously failed, and we expect that to happen once again,” he said.

“The president is really interfering with the constitutional right of Congress to have the power of the purse. There have been countless lawsuits,” John Peller, president and CEO of AIDS Foundation Chicago, told ABC Chicago.

“It makes tremendous sense to be investing in HIV prevention programs if the concern is about saving money,” Peller said.

Among those named in the suit is Russel Vought, head of the White House Office of Management and Budget, who was a prominent author of Project 2025 and has been instrumental in advancing the Heritage Foundation’s far-right, Christian nationalist agenda in Trump’s second term.

In March 2025, the National Institutes of Health canceled funding for dozens of HIV-related research grants in a drive to stamp out what the Trump administration calls ideologically-driven science.

Among the latest cuts are $1.1 million for HIV surveillance in Los Angeles County; $876,000 to California universities to address “reducing social isolation among older L.G.B.T.Q. adults”; $371,000 to focus on “engaging Latino and African American” men who have sex with men in Colorado; $7 million for the city of Chicago to study populations that are disproportionately affected by STDs; and $5.2 million to Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago to increase use of PrEP among Black cisgender women.

A spokesman for OMB told ABC News the CDC cuts affect states with a “history of fraud and mismanagement.”

The same four states, as well as New York, were targeted by the Department of Health and Human Services when it moved just weeks ago to halt $10 billion in social services and child care funding, alleging the money is being misused. A lawsuit against those cuts was also filed in response.

Matthew Rose, senior public policy advocate at the Human Rights Campaign, said cuts to HIV funding could reverse hard-earned gains made against the virus that causes AIDS.

“We are on the precipice of truly transforming the way that prevention has happened,” Rose said. “They’re like, ‘No, let’s pull up all the roots.'”

“You’re looking at billions of dollars getting spent on HIV,” he said. “None of the other HIV organizations and private companies have that kind of money to put into that kind of space.”

“They can’t make up for that gap that we worked so hard for that federal money to do.”

Rose also noted the irony of Trump launching his own program in 2019 to end the HIV epidemic in the U.S. by 2030. The successive waves of funding cuts and grant terminations seem to contradict that goal, he said.

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