Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha is once again teaming up with his fellow Democratic attorneys general in a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s administration — this time over grants for post-pandemic health infrastructure that the feds abruptly canceled last week.
The suit, filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island, is co-led by Neronha and AGs Phil Weiser of Colorado, Rob Bonta of California, Keith Ellison of Minnesota, and Nick Brown of Washington. An additional 17 AGs — plus the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania — are listed as plaintiffs in the suit, which is aimed at U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
“The secretary and the president are dead wrong legally,” Neronha told reporters gathered at his offices on South Main Street in Providence.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which is overseen by HHS, ended $11.4 billion nationwide, including about $31 million in Rhode Island, in post-pandemic grants meant to build and maintain public health efforts that will help stave off future pandemics. That includes efforts like vaccination outreach and clinics, laboratory testing, and disease prevention and monitoring.
Rhode Island Department of Health (RIDOH) officials learned about the cuts last week. The grants, previously allocated but still unspent, had expiration dates ranging from May 2025 to July 2026, and supported programs relating to child immunization, epidemiology, and initiatives to strengthen community-based health efforts and lessen health disparities.
Neronha acknowledged that this case was “not dissimilar” from the other multi-state cases his office has joined against the federal government. One example is the January lawsuit against the Office of Management and Budget also filed in Rhode Island’s federal court and also led by Neronha — among the earliest examples of litigative resistance against the Trump administration’s avalanche of executive orders and agency directives.
“This administration has been replete with irrational decision-making. This is just one context of it,” Neronha said.
But in this case, the endangered funds affect money on which “literally the health and safety of Rhode Islanders depend,” Neronha said.
HHS memo ‘defies common sense’
The CDC annulled the grants just a few weeks after the fifth anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic. To underline the importance of preventing future outbreaks of the same scale, Neronha painted a landscape for reporters: Providence in 2020, when the streets and bridges were empty, and the traffic basically nonexistent.
“I remember very vividly the absence of people on the highway, the absence of people in Providence,” Neronha recalled. “I remember getting my nose swabbed in parking garages in Providence, Rhode Island Hospital, and at the train station in Wickford so that I could come to work.”
“The notion that we could shut down our way of life for so long because of a pandemic was unthinkable,” Neronha continued. “Yet it happened.”
Standing by Neronha’s side at the press conference was Dr. Jerome “Jerry” Larkin, director of the health department. Larkin supplemented Neronha’s depiction of life under the pandemic with a more recent example.
“In January, we actually had a very vivid illustration of how public health works,” Larkin said, recounting how an unvaccinated Rhode Island child traveled internationally, “to a part of the world where measles is common,” and returned with the highly contagious disease as a souvenir — a situation that could have turned catastrophic, if not for the health department’s efforts.
“Their diagnosis was made in a timely fashion,” Larkin said. “Appropriate response was put in place by our healthcare providers, by the Department of Health, that person recovered. Nothing happened.”
Larkin told Rhode Island legislators last week at committee hearings that the HHS memo nullifying the remaining grant money was technical. On Tuesday, he told reporters the dismissal was more like nonsense: “It’s difficult to explain that which defies common sense.”
The lost grants constitute 21% of the state’s overall federal funding, Larkin said, which is comparable to the CDC money lost in other states — $81 million in Maine and $87 million in Massachusetts, the doctor offered as examples.
“It has been difficult since January 20 to answer any question related to this administration,” Larkin added.
Neronha said that Trump is pushing the executive branch in an “authoritarian” direction, by frequently ignoring the powers of Congress to allocate money.
“The fundamental legal problem is what he’s doing directly contradicts what the Congress told the president to do, which is to spend this money,” Neronha said. “That’s for you. We pay our federal taxes…to the federal government so that they can protect us from things that we can’t protect ourselves from.”
The legal complaint, which is seeking an injunction against HHS according to the 45-page initial court filing, did not have a hearing date scheduled as of Tuesday evening.
This story was originally published by the Rhode Island Current.
