Attorney General Neronha co-leads lawsuit to stop the dismantling of Health and Human Services

"This attack on HHS tells you everything you need to know about the priorities of this Administration, and they don’t include your health or that of your family.”

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha is co-leading a coalition of 20 attorneys general in filing a lawsuit in United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island against Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and other Trump administration officials to stop the dismantling of HHS.

Since taking office, Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration have fired thousands of federal health workers, shuttered vital programs, and abandoned states to face mounting health crises without federal support. The attorneys general argue that Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration have robbed HHS of the resources necessary to serve the American people effectively and are asking the court to halt further dismantling of HHS and restore key program operations.

Here’s the press conference video:

“Since day one, this President and his Administration have attempted to illegally decimate agencies across the federal government upon which the American people rely,” said Attorney General Neronha. “In a world where the next pandemic could be right around the corner, and cases of measles are on the rise, taking an axe to the agency responsible for the health and safety of Americans is wildly irresponsible. Americans across the country are already experiencing the detrimental effects of this attack on HHS, including new mothers, workers, 9/11 first responders, and those suffering from mental illness and substance use disorder. Think about that for a minute: American heroes, pregnant women, workers, those in need of mental health treatment, all left to fend for themselves by these reckless cuts. This attack on HHS tells you everything you need to know about the priorities of this Administration, and they don’t include your health or that of your family.”

---

Joining Attorney General Neronha were health leaders impacted by the dismantling of HHS. Dr. Beth Cronin is the Rhode Island section chair of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) and a practicing OB-GYN in Providence.

“When HHS eliminated the division of reproductive health in late March, it led to some unforeseen changes. This division oversees the study of health and wellbeing of pregnant people and their babies and oversaw the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), which is a population-based surveillance system to identify groups of women and infants at high risk for health problems, monitor changes in their health status, and measure progress towards improving the health of mothers and their infants. In turn, organizations use this data to apply for and obtain grant funding for statewide health improvement initiatives.

“The Centers for Disease Control (CDC)’s Division of Reproductive Health (DRH) is also responsible for running the Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System, which is a national surveillance of pregnancy-related deaths in the United States. This program helps support our state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committees (MMRC).

“I want to address why these cuts will continue negatively impacting Rhode Islanders today and in the future. Pregnancy-related complications result in approximately 700 deaths each year in the United States. Additionally, for every pregnancy-related death, there are 70 severe maternal morbidity events or unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short or long-term health outcomes for these individuals. These maternal health disparities significantly impact Indigenous and Black women, who experience approximately two to three times higher rates of pregnancy-related mortality compared to white women. We need data to address these disparities. We cannot cut funding to programs that work to identify these causes without disastrous long-term consequences.

“MMRCs are multidisciplinary state or local level groups that provide a comprehensive review of deaths that happen during pregnancy or within that first year postpartum. The data from MMRCs is one of the most powerful tools for identifying evidence-based approaches to saving lives. It helps us do a deeper dive into pregnancy-related deaths by reviewing data from a variety of sources, such as autopsy records, informant interviews, and identifying clinical and nonclinical factors that contributed to each of these deaths. It helps us create a more comprehensive picture of how these deaths occurred. By understanding pregnancy-related deaths, we can then create more comprehensive recommendations and strategies for preventing them and the morbidity that goes along with all those other patients. Without this data, we will be in the dark about improving care and preventing these outcomes for Rhode Islanders for many years to come.

“For more than a decade, ACOG has worked collaboratively with innovative partners across the field of maternal health to help identify ways to save lives. We are still in a maternal mortality crisis, and MMRCS must have funding to support this uninterrupted review process and access the necessary resources so that we can continue to take care of our patients.”

Daniel Fitzgerald is the Director of Advocacy of the American Lung Association in Rhode Island.

“I stand before you today representing the 35 million people living in America with lung diseases. That includes over 187,000 Rhode Islanders. As a direct result of the Trump administration’s elimination of staff and funding at Health and Human Services agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we have seen critical programs such as the National Asthma Control Program and the Office on Smoking and Health be eliminated, causing irreparable harm. The funding being taken from our state is funds that Congress has already appropriated and the president has signed into law. It’s not only a bad policy decision but illegal. That is why it is so very important that Attorney General Neronha and his fellow attorneys general take action and fight back.

“Eliminating these programs not only undermines decades of public health progress but threatens to place a greater strain on our already overburdened health systems. Let me be clear: Cutting funding to these programs will harm lung health. These cuts will lead to more kids suffering from asthma attacks and ending up in our hospital’s emergency departments. They’ll lead to more youth becoming addicted to tobacco products and to fewer people successfully quitting. With no notice, the Lung Association in Rhode Island has already lost federal funding for asthma and tobacco control programs. These drastic cuts immediately halted lifesaving programs and resulted in an extreme reduction of our ability to respond.

“Here in Rhode Island, asthma is the leading cause of chronic absenteeism in schools. Providence was found to be one of the top 10 most challenging places to live with asthma, and federal cuts to asthma control programs and environmental protection efforts will exacerbate all of this.

“The Rhode Island Tobacco Control and Prevention Network was decimated just last week. These federal cuts immediately stopped programming directly funding Rhode Island public schools in their efforts to fight against the youth vaping epidemic. They were implementing evidence-based quit programs and alternatives to suspension programs that kept Rhode Island kids in school while addressing and improving health outcomes.

“These funding cuts immediately halted public education campaigns and prevention programming, and it has all but eliminated support for Rhode Islanders who need help quitting. Let’s not forget that commercial tobacco use remains the leading cause of preventable death and disease here in the United States. At the Lung Association, nothing else matters when you cannot breathe.”

Paige Parks is the executive director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, a statewide children’s policy and advocacy organization dedicated to improving the health, safety, education, economic wellbeing, and development of Rhode Island’s children with a core focus on equity and eliminating disparities based on race, ethnicity, income, immigration status, disability, neighborhood, and zip code.

“This afternoon, my remarks are about Rhode Island’s children, the impact of dismantling HHS, any changes to federal funding, and what effect it would have on the important programs that many of our Rhode Island children depend upon. Decades of research have shown that high-quality preschool programs help children gain academic and social-emotional skills before school entry and can produce positive outcomes that last well into the school years, including reduced need for special education services and improved high school graduation rates.

“Learning disparities appear early and grow over time without access to enriching early learning experiences. Participating in high-quality early learning programs from birth through kindergarten helps ensure children enter school with the skills needed to succeed. Without government funding and the support of HHS, children from low-income families and Black and Latino children will have less access to high-quality preschool compared to higher-income white families.

“Head Start programs deliver early education, dental, medical, and mental health supports, nutrition services, developmental screenings, and also help families by having them involved in program decision-making, helping to build parental skills, and supporting their entry and retention in the workforce. In October 2024, 1,438 children were enrolled in Head Start, and there were 493 eligible children on a waiting list. The Rhode Island Head Start program scores above the national average, significantly above research-based thresholds in emotional support and classroom organization, and meets research-based thresholds for instructional support based on classroom observations and teacher/child interactions.

“It’s also important to note that Head Start is integral to Rhode Island’s early learning system and the Rhode Island pre-K delivery system. Head Start agencies administer 40% of Rhode Island’s pre-K programs. If Head Start collapses, our early learning system becomes even more fragile. It’s like when you play the game of Jenga and the stack is fragile. The last thing you want to do is pull out that block on the bottom because it is holding up so much. That’s what our Head Start programs are in Rhode Island.

“Rhode Island KIDS COUNT supports federal and state investments in Head Start. Rhode Island is one of 14 states and Washington, D.C., that invests state funds into Head Start and Early Head Start to serve more children, support more competitive teacher salaries, and help programs meet their federally required 20% match. We cannot lose this incredibly important program that not only helps to build the future of children and their families, but is critically important to all of our futures.”

Julian Drix works for Human Impact Partners (HIP). This national health justice organization transforms the field of public health to center equity and build collective power with social justice movements. Before that, he worked at the Rhode Island Department of Health for eight years, leading Rhode Island’s asthma program funded through the National Asthma Control Program at the CDC. When Covid hit, Drix was asked to serve in a leadership role in Rhode Island’s Covid response, defending the public’s health from a deadly virus. “Our efforts were made worse by the first Trump administration’s mismanagement,” noted Drix. “What we did have at that time was the funding and people to do the necessary, daily, life-saving public health work.

“Today, unfortunately,” continued Drix, “we are defending public health itself, and the attack is not from a virus but from the Trump administration’s dismantling of the national public health infrastructure. Unfortunately, public health is poorly understood, even after what we went through collectively with Covid. Where healthcare, doctors, and healthcare facilities treat individual patients, public health focuses on treating and supporting the health of entire populations. Public health is about shaping the conditions that allow everyone to thrive, involving every policy, structure, and cultural input that touches our lives. Health equity means everyone should have a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible. To achieve this, we need to remove obstacles to health, such as poverty, racism, discrimination, and lack of power over decision-making.

“During my time at the Rhode Island Asthma Control Program, some of our work was to track and produce data around asthma. Who has it? How severe is it? What are the disparities by race, age, geography, and other important factors? Funding and staffing for programs are necessary to address the highest need, and funding for programs providing asthma home visits for children who have been hospitalized for severe asthma, to provide nurses and community health workers who can go into homes to identify and remove asthma triggers in their environment; and, environmental public health tracking systems to track disease that is caused and impacted by our environment; not to mention climate change, which is a risk amplifier that takes all the other stressors and inequalities in our system, amplifies them, and makes them worse.

“These are critical, important life-saving infrastructure for Rhode Island, a state that has consistently been in the top five for asthma rates for many years, and has deep disparities by race, with asthma particularly impacting Black and Latino children in our urban core. We need the government to provide support and protection, and produce the data. Our program at the Department of Health produced the asthma data shared with KIDS COUNT for their annual fact book. That data doesn’t exist out of thin air. People create it. It is created through programs that tell us what diseases impact people’s health, and at what rates.

“During the first Trump administration, there was a point where he suggested getting rid of testing because the data about Covid was a problem for him and he wanted to make it go away, but getting rid of the data doesn’t make the problem go away, it makes it less inconvenient for those in positions of power who stand to benefit from making people sick.

“Environmental regulations protect us from the industries polluting the air, water, soil, and food, on which all human health depends. They will not protect us on their own. The market has never protected us by itself. We need a strong protective government that is accountable to us, not to the industry robber barons to whom Trump is accountable.”

---

On March 27, Secretary Kennedy revealed a dramatic restructuring of HHS as part of the president’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) initiative. The secretary announced that the department’s 28 agencies would collapse into 15, with many surviving offices shuffled or split apart. He also announced mass firings, slashing the department’s headcount from 85,000 to 65,000. On April 1, Secretary Kennedy terminated 10,000 HHS employees across the nation. Half of HHS’s regional offices were closed, including those in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle.

In the lawsuit, the attorneys general argue that these changes have wreaked havoc across the entire health system. Since Secretary Kennedy abruptly shut down congressionally mandated surveillance programs, miners suffering from black lung disease have been left unprotected. Workers nationwide can no longer reliably access N95 masks following the closure of the nation’s only federal mask approval laboratory. Key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) infectious disease laboratories have also been shuttered, including those responsible for testing and tracking measles, effectively halting the federal government’s ability to monitor the disease nationwide.

Hundreds of employees working on mental health and addiction treatment, including half of the entire workforce at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), have been fired, and all SAMHSA regional offices are now closed. The World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP), which provides life-saving care to more than 137,000 9/11 first responders and survivors, has lost the doctors needed to certify new cancer diagnoses, leaving American heroes without access to the health care they deserve. Pregnant women and newborns are now at risk after the firing of the entire CDC maternal health team, and after Senator Kennedy fired many regional employees at the Office of Head Start, Head Start centers could face closures.

With this illegal restructuring, Rhode Island has already lost over $1.9 million and will lose more in grants, staff, programs, and data. State health programs and initiatives that have already been eliminated or negatively impacted without the support of HHS funding and staff include maternal mortality studies and prevention, treatment for nicotine and alcohol addiction, air quality monitoring, and more. If further planned cuts are allowed, Rhode Island will lose much more.

Attorney General Neronha and the coalition argue that these sweeping actions violate hundreds of federal statutes and regulations and that the Trump administration has no authority to make these reckless changes. The attorneys general allege that by taking these actions without congressional approval, the administration disregards the constitutional separation of powers and undermines the laws and budgets enacted by Congress to protect public health. Since its founding, HHS has worked to protect and advance the health and wellbeing of all Americans. The attorneys general assert that the mission is in jeopardy under this recent restructuring.

The coalition urges the court to halt the mass firings, reverse the illegal reorganization, and restore the critical health services that millions of Americans depend on.

On April 1, Attorney General Neronha joined a coalition of 23 attorneys general in filing a lawsuit against Secretary Kennedy and the Trump administration for abruptly and unlawfully slashing billions of dollars in vital state health funding. On April 4, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Administration, temporarily reinstating the funding.

Attorney General Neronha co-leads this lawsuit with New York Attorney General Letitia James and Washington Attorney General Nick Brown. The attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai’i, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia joined the lawsuit.