A federal judge has found that the Trump administration’s massive cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were unlawful.
U.S. District Judge Melissa DuBose, a Biden appointee, ruled Tuesday that the sweeping HHS cuts following Trump coming into office were “arbitrary and capricious as well as contrary to the law.”
She blocked the Trump administration from finalizing any HHS layoffs that were decided on March 27 and onwards, as well as preventing it from firing any more of the department’s employees.
Democratic attorney generals from 19 states and Washington D.C. filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration back in May, calling out HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s restructuring plans for the department in his attempt to “Make America Healthy Again.”
The suit claimed that the “confusing reorganization” was “unlawful” and could cause “severe, complicated, and potentially irreversible” consequences on public health.
DuBose granted the attorney generals the preliminary injunction, stating that there was “no rational basis” for the administration’s reorganizing efforts, adding that the mass layoffs would have “devastating consequences” on the nation.
“Critical public health services have been interrupted, databases taken offline, status of grants thrown into chaos, technical assistance services gone, and training and consultation services curtailed,” DuBose wrote in the order. “These are not unsubstantiated fears.”
Kennedy said in March that his plan was to “eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA.”
“This overhaul will improve the health of the entire nation—to Make America Healthy Again,” he said.
We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025
Yet, DuBose noted that the administration’s decision to slash more than 10,000 HHS employees, sending a handful of HHS programs “into a rapid freefall away from their statutory obligations,” was actually “irreparably harming the States.”
“HHS has failed to produce a shred of evidence that services to States and access to critical information would continue uninterrupted, that the harms are minimal or not irreparable, or that it is authorized to act absent Congressional action,” she remarked on the mass layoffs.
Departments were either drastically reduced or fully eliminated, including divisions tied to HIV prevention, the tracking of measles, tobacco control among minors, and preventing firearm injury and death.
Prior to these cuts, around 10,000 HHS employees had already resigned from their positions after President Donald Trump took office. As a result, the approximately 82,000 full-time HHS employees dropped to 62,000 following the cuts.
Only a few days after this wave of layoffs, Kennedy admitted that he had inadvertently slashed too many employees and would be reinstating them, though he said that “was always the plan.”
The post Judge Rules That Trump’s Health Department Cuts Were Unlawful appeared first on The Daily Beast.
