California AG says federal cuts are actually helping legal fight with Trump: ‘They can't keep up'

San Francisco Chronicle​

2 days ago

WASHINGTON — Democratic attorneys general fighting the Trump administration on an array of policy issues are seizing on the widespread cuts and resignations of federal employees, an effort that may be coming back to bite the White House.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, buoyed by $25 million from a special legislative session, has been hiring new staff — including some of those former federal employees, he told the Chronicle while in Washington, D.C., to hear Supreme Court arguments in a case the state is party to.
While Bonta and other state attorneys have been strategically preparing for prolonged legal battles against the administration, federal cuts have left the U.S. Justice Department without enough staff to handle its workload.
More than half the attorneys at the Justice Department's civil rights division, led by San Francisco attorney Harmeet Dhillon, have left, the Wall Street Journal reported. And in some cases, Bonta said, U.S. attorneys — district prosecutors — have appeared on the Trump administration's behalf instead of lawyers from the main Justice Department.
'Their own strategy of 'flood the zone' — and the confusion and chaos and shock and awe — has almost this boomerang effect, where we've responded and the ball's back in their court now and they can't keep up,' Bonta said. 'This speed and this volume has repercussions on their ability to defend themselves.'
During the first Trump administration, then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra brought or was party to 110 cases, according to a CalMatters database. The state won 82% of the 28 cases that reached a final verdict. This go-round, Bonta has already brought or is party to 22 cases and won injunctions against the administration in nine.
The volume of cases is 'double the speed, double the pace,' compared to the first Trump administration, Bonta said. At the current rate, 'we will hit the number of total cases of Trump 1.0 by the (2026) midterms.'
'We're doing everything faster and with more volume in a broader variety of cases, more nuance, more issues,' he said. 'So we're just more proficient at it … including working together and filing more quickly, being more responsive to the actions.'
That includes coordination among state attorneys. 'More bodies and more talent is going to help us. We've learned as Democratic AGs how to marshal resources together and share those resources, and deploy them strategically and efficiently,' Bonta said.
The first Trump administration was a period of discovery for state attorneys general, who were figuring out how they could use their authority, he said. This time, the top state lawyers were more prepared and began sharing resources over a year before Trump took office.
During the first month of Trump's current term, 23 Democratic state attorneys general held a daily video chat to coordinate their efforts, Politico reported. They strategized over which courts to file cases, whether to seek state or federal venues and how to prove sufficient harm to be heard in court.
Bonta told Politico he preemptively drafted challenges to potential actions from a second Trump administration, particularly focusing on ideas from Project 2025.
Although the final verdict in many of these cases could come from the Supreme Court, whose 6-3 conservative majority includes three Trump appointees, Bonta appeared confident that the state would prevail in several key cases.
The state has primarily faced pushback on jurisdictional issues. A U.S. District Court judge hearing the state's challenge to Trump's tariffs suggested it should be heard in the U.S. Court of International Trade instead.
In the state's suit over the termination of teacher preparation grants, the Supreme Court ruled that the case was a contractual dispute and needed to be heard in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims rather than a District Court. UC Davis law professor Aaron Tang argued that ruling was effectively the Supreme Court trying to give Trump a win, without actually letting him win by not ruling on the merits of the case.
Bonta said the cases that pose the biggest financial risk to California involve the administration's massive import tariffs and its efforts to withhold congressionally appropriated funding from states — which make up about half of the cases he has brought.
Trump's proposed tariffs would be 'massively damaging,' to California, he said.
'We're the largest state — nearly 40 million people — fourth largest economy in the world now, largest importer of any state, second largest exporter, biggest manufacturer, largest agricultural exporter,' Bonta said. 'An outsized economy means an outsized impact on California of the tariffs.'
Federal funding freezes or cuts are also of huge concern, Bonta said. The second case he brought was against the administration's efforts to freeze all federal grant funding, which would have left a $168 billion gap in California's budget, at a time when the state is facing an enormous deficit.
The two cases Bonta said pose the biggest social risks are the administration's effort to revoke birthright citizenship — which was the reason Bonta had traveled to Washington, D.C. — and to force states to require proof of citizenship to vote while prohibiting states from counting ballots received after election day.
He said he's confident the states will win the birthright citizenship case because 'it's a deprivation of a constitutional right by our own federal government, and it's so clear and so blatant.'