Democrat legislators are fighting back against President Donald Trump's attempts to withhold funding from their states.
The states are coming up with bills that would turn the tide and permit them to withhold federal payments if the federal government is delinquent in funding owed to them, NBC News reported Sunday.
Legal experts said the untested approach — introduced in bills as of now in Connecticut, Maryland, New York, and Wisconsin — still have a long way to go before becoming law and would face obstacles.
David Moon, the Democrat majority leader in Maryland's House of Delegates, explained to NBC News that "Trump is illegally withholding funds that have been previously approved. Without these funds, we are going to see Maryland residents severely harmed — we needed more options on the table for how Maryland could respond and protect its residents."
Moon said the two Maryland bills are in response to actions by Trump that have withheld federal funding for programs that pay to assist with children's mental health and flood wall protection.
The Department of Government Efficiency has unilaterally frozen billions of dollars in funding for programs that DOGE says are riddled with waste and fraud. Trump has also threatened to withhold federal funding from states that implement policies such as allowing men to compete in women's sports.
Wisconsin state Rep. Renuka Mayadev, a Democrat, said that "we've seen the Trump administration is willfully breaking the law by holding back federal funds to which Wisconsinites are legally entitled. So these bills are really about providing for a legal remedy and protecting Wisconsinites."
In all four states, the bills direct state officials to withhold payments owed by the states to the federal government if federal agencies have acted in contravention of judicial orders or have taken unlawful actions to withhold funds previously appropriated by Congress, according to NBC News.
Although in Wisconsin the legislation is unlikely to move forward because Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature, the bills have a chance to be enacted in Maryland, New York, and Connecticut, because Democrats control their legislatures and governorships.
However, legal experts have said a major hurdle to such legislation is that the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause clearly gives the federal government precedence over states.
In addition, on a practical level, there is vastly more money flowing from the federal government to the states than the other way around.
"So withholding state payments to the federal government, even if there were no other obstacles, isn't likely to change very much," said David Super, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center who specializes in administrative and constitutional law.
However, Jon Michaels, a professor at the UCLA School of Law who specializes in the separation of powers and presidential power, said that doesn't mean states shouldn't try.
"Where can you try to claw back money in different ways? Not because it's going to make a huge material difference for the state treasury or for the people of the state, but just to essentially show the federal government like, 'Hey, we know what you're doing and we don't like it,'" he told NBC News. "States need to be enterprising and creative and somewhat feisty in figuring out their own scope of authority and the ways in which they can challenge the law."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.