California Sues to Block Trump and RFK Jr. Health Cuts That Shuttered SF Office

California is suing the Trump administration over an order that aimed to shrink the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through mass layoffs and office closures, including in San Francisco.

Attorney General Rob Bonta joined 19 other attorneys general on the lawsuit filed Monday in Rhode Island federal court, which requests that a judge block the “Make America Healthy Again” directive announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in March. The suit calls for reversing the department cuts, which shut down San Francisco’s regional post and could have ripple effects on programs like Medicare and Medicaid, Head Start and Meals on Wheels.

“The Trump Administration does not have the power to incapacitate a department that Congress created, nor can it decline to spend funds that were appropriated by Congress for that department,” Bonta said in a statement. “That’s why my fellow attorneys general and I are taking the Trump Administration to court — [Health and Human Services] is under attack, and we won’t stand for it.”

The suit is the 17th that Bonta has filed against the Trump administration since he took office in January.

It alleges that Kennedy’s order, which called for the consolidation of HHS’s 28 divisions to 15 and the closure of five district offices, violated the Administrative Procedure Act and should be declared unconstitutional. The attorneys general say Kennedy’s directive was “arbitrary and capricious,” and has made it impossible for the department to perform functions required by law.

The directive said it would focus on “government efficiency,” reducing the workforce of the department while maintaining its key services, but Bonta and the coalition suing the administration allege that it has ground work to a halt in several agencies.

“The Office of Compliance and Enforcement within the Center for Tobacco Products — a subagency within HHS — typically filed more than 100 complaints a week seeking civil monetary penalties against retailers that repeatedly sold tobacco to customers under 21,” Bonta’s office said in a statement. “The [Make America Healthy Again] Directive wiped out the Office of Compliance and Enforcement, straining the ability of remaining staff to seek penalties.”

A week after releasing the reorganization directive, Kennedy directed the closure of half of the agency’s 10 regional offices and fired about 10,000 employees. At San Francisco’s shuttered office, workers were locked out of the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building and cut off from access to their government email accounts and computers.

The city’s office housed federal HIV/AIDS research and carried out HHS programs in California, Arizona, Hawaii and Nevada, along with six American territories and more than 100 independent tribes.

Employees said at the time that the move would incapacitate some of their divisions’ ability to reach far-flung rural communities on the West Coast and where other regional offices were closed, and could set back tenuous gains in building trust with tribes and territories.