Editor’s note: This is the second article in The 50 vs. The One, an occasional series examining the current fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country. Read the first article here.
President Donald Trump is wielding power in unprecedented ways to bring states to heel, marking a dark new chapter in the relationship between the federal government and the states.
Since taking office last year, Trump has punished Democratic-led states that anger him by withholding federal funding and slow-walking assistance. His administration has denied disaster aid to states whose governors are most critical of him, cut childcare and social services funding, launched investigations into blue states and poured immigration officers and military members into liberal cities.
Presidents and Congress have long leveraged federal power to influence the states, funding everything from welfare to highways. And presidents have long faced legal challenges from political adversaries.
But the Trump administration has begun wielding federal resources as a weapon against states, using dollars to cajole and threaten them into complying with its political agenda. Instead of working with Congress to nudge states, Trump is moving unilaterally, bypassing lawmakers and speaking plainly about punishing political rivals — defining an era in American history that scholars call “punitive federalism.”
“These guys are acting like autocrats and trying to destroy our democracy,” said Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, a Democrat. “And you have to understand the role that states play in this. There was a reason why our structure was set up the way it’s set up.”
Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding on July 4, Stateline is exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the second in an occasional series examining the fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.
“States have rights, and thank God we have those rights and the ability to push back, because this Trump agenda is just destructive for our country,” Welch told Stateline. “And I believe we’re going to survive because of our federalism system.”
The tense political moment has underscored the role of states as Democratic leaders across the country file scores of lawsuits and introduce state legislation in attempts to check the president’s actions. State lawmakers have proposed hundreds of new measures that would limit law enforcement and immigration activities to push back against the White House. But Democratic states have had the most success in the courts, where dozens of federal policies have been challenged.
Since Trump took office last year, Illinois alone has led or joined more than 60 lawsuits against the administration. Those suits run the gamut, challenging deployment of the National Guard, immigration enforcement and the withholding of disaster funding. Democratic attorneys general say they are winning in most of the cases that have reached court decisions.
Wendy Bobadilla, who runs a daycare in California, worries about how the president’s actions may harm the hardworking families who rely on her for childcare. (Photo courtesy of Wendy Bobadilla)
While some GOP members of Congress have balked at Trump’s targeting of blue states, many Republicans have stayed silent or defended Trump’s actions.
The White House did not respond to detailed questions for this story. In a statement, spokesperson Davis Ingle told Stateline that the administration “faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”
But Trump’s punitive federalism strategy has left real people and communities scrambling to respond to White House moves.
Wendy Bobadilla worries she and other California childcare providers will be forced to close their doors if the Trump administration succeeds in blocking childcare funds to a handful of Democratic-led states.
“I don’t think he understands what he’s doing and how he’s affecting our children,” she told Stateline.
A more powerful executive branch
Federalism is a uniquely American system created by the framers of the Constitution that provides for power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states.
Since World War II, the federal government under Democratic and Republican presidents has grown in size and scope. But the White House itself has also accumulated more power, said Nicholas Jacobs, a professor of American government at Colby College in Maine.
“It’s not just that power has shifted from states to the federal government,” he said. “Power has shifted to the executive branch specifically and has become more raw in its overt partisan nature.”
Trump has embraced partisanship in new ways, moving beyond policy differences and into raw retaliation, Jacobs said.
“(President Barack) Obama had blue states and red states, and you can see that clearly, but he didn’t seem to openly celebrate the idea that he was penalizing red states and advancing the causes of blue states,” Jacobs said. “Donald Trump actually uses those terms.”
This increasing partisanship and Trump’s deep cuts to federal agencies has strained relationships between the federal government and states, which administer many federal policies and programs.
State and local governments need certainty to create, pay for and staff programs, said Marcia Howard, executive director of Federal Funds Information for States, which analyzes how federal policymaking affects states. But the Trump administration has injected uncertainty and tested the power of the executive by targeting funds that were explicitly appropriated by Congress, she said.
“They are unprecedented,” she said of the administration’s moves. “In general, an administration takes an appropriations bill at its word, and adheres to it.”
Court challenges
In California, Bobadilla worries about how the president’s actions may harm the hardworking families who rely on her for childcare.
In January, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it was withholding $10 billion in childcare and other social services from California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota and New York. The agency suggested fraud played a role in the decision, though the administration hasn’t offered evidence.
With part-time help, Bobadilla cares for about 14 children out of her home in Palmdale, north of Los Angeles. About a dozen of those kids’ families pay with the help of subsidy programs. The local poverty rate there exceeds regional, state and national averages.
With families commuting up to 90 minutes per day, Bobadilla sometimes opens as early as 4 a.m. and closes as late as 9:30 p.m. to accommodate working-class parents with fluctuating schedules.
Asked what she would tell the president, Bobadilla said, “I would tell him that I’m working very hard, that I’m not committing any fraud, that I wake up earlier than anybody that I know.”
States have rights, and thank God we have those rights and the ability to push back.
– Illinois House Speaker Emanuel ‘Chris’ Welch, a Democrat
A federal judge in late March ordered the Trump administration not to withhold the funds. A lawsuit over funding is ongoing.
It’s among more than 700 court cases challenging the administration.
“He has decided to break the law. He has decided to be blatant and brazen about it. He has decided to be consistent and frequent in his violations,” California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta told Stateline. “He did some of this in Trump 1.0, but the speed and volume of unlawful actions, particularly vis-à-vis the states, is unprecedented.”
Bonta acknowledged the decisions of past presidents have been challenged in courts.
“But it wasn’t every week, time after time,” he said. “This is a different thing entirely, like this is the plan. The plan is to break the law.”
Trump has maintained his strategy of holding hostage congressionally approved funding despite court losses, according to a New York Times analysis of nearly 200 legal cases. Bonta said more than half of the 60-plus cases his office has filed against the administration aim to retrieve funding that was already appropriated by Congress.
“It’s like he’s a repeat offender,” Bonta said. “He’s incorrigible.”
Democratic and Republican state attorneys general do work across party lines on some bipartisan issues, including consumer protection and artificial intelligence. But the resistance to Trump’s expansion of federal power has almost entirely come from the left.
“Honestly, what I think they think is that they’re secretly cheering for us,” Bonta said of his Republican colleagues.
He said Republican states still benefit when Democratic attorneys general win constitutional challenges or get courts to reverse the administration’s funding cuts to states.
“And they get the benefit without having to dare to challenge their dear leader,” Bonta said.
The Republican Attorneys General Association says its members have remained focused on reducing crime in their states during Trump’s second term.
“Tax paying, law abiding citizens in blue states across America are flooding into red states because people care about their safety and their children’s future,” Adam Piper, executive director of the association, said in a written statement. “Republican Attorneys General have always been both freedom’s front line and America’s last line of defense against radicals seeking to upend the rule of law and the American way.”
Disaster assistance
Last May, floods damaged hundreds of homes in Western Maryland, leaving behind more than $30 million in damages to roads, homes, businesses and utility systems in a swath of Republican-leaning counties that voted overwhelmingly for Trump.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied assistance for the floods, which hit a conservative region of a solidly liberal state.
Democratic Gov. Wes Moore — a Trump antagonist and potential presidential contender — noted that an aid request from neighboring West Virginia was approved, despite that conservative state submitting a lower amount of flood damages to the feds. He called Maryland’s denial “petty,” “partisan” and “deeply unfair” to the affected communities.
FEMA has said the law requires the agency to closely examine each disaster and the ability of local governments to respond. The agency told The Hill that Maryland’s flood “was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state and affected local governments to recover.”
It’s not just that power has shifted from states to the federal government. Power has shifted to the executive branch specifically and has become more raw in its overt partisan nature.
– Nicholas Jacobs, American government professor at Colby College
Chas Eby, deputy secretary at the Maryland Department of Emergency Management, said the state’s application to FEMA substantiated more than three times the amount of damages needed to qualify for the federal agency’s assistance.
“We were surprised,” he said, noting that a federal disaster declaration could have made funds available to directly aid in the repair of private property.
Trump has rejected disaster aid for Democratic-led states at the highest rate in FEMA’s history, according to Politico, whose March analysis determined that it was three times harder for blue states to receive disaster aid than Republican-led states.
The Maryland denial not only affected those who suffered property damage, but it also has left the state uncertain about the future of disaster aid at large.
“Where we’ve relied on federal support in the past, this is a clear indicator that it may not be available in the future,” Eby said. “And therefore, how do we as state and local emergency managers meet the need? Because the expectations that I have to support disaster survivors and that Marylanders have in their government haven’t really changed.”
In the absence of federal support, Maryland awarded state disaster relief funding for the first time ever. But the initial funds — less than $500,000 — covered just a fraction of the tens of millions in documented needs, Eby said.
Allegany County, Maryland, which has an annual budget of about $150 million, has spent about $8 million so far to repair public infrastructure damaged in the floods, said county spokesperson Kati Kenney. None of that money has gone to individual households or businesses.
“That money was spent just to make it usable, not to make it back to par,” she said. “It was just like a Band-Aid.”
‘It’s not worse, it’s not better’
Many conservatives see the opposition from blue states as the latest pendulum swing of American politics rather than a more significant evolution in federal-state relationships.
“It’s not worse, it’s not better, it’s largely the same,” said Washington state Rep. Jim Walsh, a Republican.
Walsh said he viewed as more egregious the actions from the administration of President Joe Biden, who he said weaponized the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in efforts to push coronavirus vaccinations.
The chair of the Washington State Republican Party, Walsh said many of the elected officials in his liberal state were “deep in the throes of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a frequent pejorative description of the president’s opponents. He said Democratic politicians were wasting millions in the courts to challenge Trump, who he said has not encroached on state authorities.
“The problem in Washington state is not that the Trump administration punishes blue cities or blue states,” he said. “The problem in Washington state is we’ve got people just burning taxpayer dollars so they can get a press release out and a headline.”
Still, Democratic-led states continue to push back on the administration.
State legislators have proposed more than 250 bills in response to federal policies, according to State Futures, a nonprofit coordinating hundreds of Democratic lawmakers across the states. Some of those bills seek to limit federal immigration enforcement in sensitive places such as schools and hospitals, and to allow individuals to sue federal law enforcement for possible constitutional violations.
Democratic state leaders are also emulating some of Trump’s own tactics.
“We have to play their game. And I think the people in my state are beginning to understand this,” said Maryland state Del. David Moon, the Democratic majority leader.
Moon pushed for legislation allowing the state to retaliate against the federal government for withholding funds. The new law, signed by Moore last month, allows the state to place liens on federal property in Maryland or withhold revenue payments to Washington if officials determine the feds are withholding congressionally approved funds in defiance of court decisions.
“It’s going to be weeks of discussion and monitoring with our lawyers and whatever before we do something drastic like that,” he said, noting the ultimate decisions will be left up to the governor. “But we have to be ready.”
Moon acknowledged that the law is “constitutionally dubious” as it’s unclear whether it will be upheld in the courts.
“And I think folks have to admit that,” he said. “But the way this bill works, really, is you take the Trump approach: that you do whatever the F you want within your layer of government.”
Moon said his concerns about the Trump era reach far beyond the usual state-federal spats.
“I think we’re in big trouble, and it’s part of why I am resorting to more unusual thinking and tactics,” he said. “We’re at the 250 mark in the republic. This is when empires fail, and we are having a vast empire decline moment.”
