Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown (D) joined two more lawsuits Monday against the Trump administration and signed on to a motion seeking a preliminary injunction in a third case.
The legal actions are the latest in a now-familiar play by Democratic states to counter the rapid-fire changes to government agencies and programs coming from President Donald Trump (R) and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The states have repeatedly gone to court to challenge the legality of the moves, many of which they say the president does not have the authority to make.
Brown has already led or joined more than two dozen suits against the administration since Trump was sworn into office Jan. 20, including taking the lead in a suit challenging the summary firing of thousands of probationary federal workers. A U.S. District judge in Greenbelt issued a preliminary injunction in that case on April 1, ordering 20 agencies to give workers their jobs back while the case went to trial.
The newest suits challenge the administration’s plan to lay off thousands of workers at the Department of Health and Human Services, and to stop federal approval of wind-power projects across the country. The motion seeks to block the president’s order that would set strict new ID requirements for voting.
In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for Rhode Island, Maryland joined with 18 other states and the District of Columbia challenging Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plans to slash staffing and close agencies at the department.
The suit, first reported in the Rhode Island Current, a part of the States Newsroom network, focused on the firing of 10,000 HHS workers and the shuttering of dozens of agencies in the department as part of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.
When termination notices went out on April 1, the suit says, “employees were immediately expelled from their work email, laptops, and offices, work across the vast and complicated Department came to a sudden halt. Throughout HHS, critical offices were left unable to perform statutory functions.”
“There was no one to answer the phone, factories went into shutdown mode, experiments were abandoned, trainings were cancelled, site visits were postponed, application portals were closed, laboratories stopped testing for infectious diseases such as hepatitis, and partnerships were immediately suspended,” the suit said, just a fraction of the impact of the layoffs it cited.
The second suit Brown joined Monday, with 16 other states and the District of Columbia, targets an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office that ordered federal agencies to pause approvals, permits and loans for all wind energy projects both onshore and offshore.
The suit says Trump’s order claims unspecified “inadequacies” in previous agency reviews of project applications and ordered “an amorphous, redundant, extra-statutory, and multi-agency review of unknown duration” of already approved plans. The order has “stopped most wind-energy development in its tracks,” the suit says.
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, cites a project that was under construction off Long Island, New York, when an order to “cease all construction activities” came on April 16 from the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, an agency within the Interior Department.
In September, the federal government approved an offshore wind project in Maryland. The suit claims U.S. Wind’s project would provide 1,710 megawatts of clean energy from a maximum of 114 turbines and create 13,600 jobs and more than $6 billion in economic benefits to the state.
“The Trump Administration’s outrageous and unlawful freeze on wind energy development is nothing short of a direct assault on Maryland’s future climate security and economic prosperity,” Brown said in a statement announcing the suit.
“With this lawsuit, we are protecting the livelihoods of thousands of families and standing firm against President Trump’s reckless attack on an industry that offers to secure reliable, affordable, and clean energy for every Marylander,” he said.
Gov. Wes Moore (D) said in the statement that Trump’s actions run counter to the state’s efforts to lower utility costs for Marylanders by increasing energy production through wind power. “At a moment when families are feeling the strain of high energy bills, we should focus on cutting red tape, not halting critical infrastructure projects,” Moore said.
Meanwhile, Brown joined a coalition of 19 attorneys general who filed a motion Monday for a preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts seeking to block Trump’s March 25 executive order that would impose sweeping voting restrictions nationwide.
If allowed ot take effect, Trump’s order would require voters to prove their citizenship with a U.S. passport, a REAL ID, a military identification card, or a federal or state government-issued photo identification.
Brown and the other attorneys general filed a lawsuit April 3 challenging the order.
“The lawsuit underscores that the power to regulate elections rests exclusively with the states and Congress – not the President,” Brown said in a statement released by his office Monday. “The attorneys general argue that they are likely to win on the merits of their lawsuit, that their states have unique and profound interests at stake in the litigation, and that their states will suffer irreparable harms without court-ordered relief.”
In all, 21 states and the District of Columbia are parties to the three actions today. In addition to Maryland, the states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Maryland Matters is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on Facebook and X.
