(The Center Square) – The California Department of Justice has spent $19.2 million in the last 18 months in 82 different lawsuits against President Donald Trump’s administration, California Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Tuesday morning.
That has saved an estimated $207.1 billion worth of federal taxpayer-funded programs and services for Californians, Bonta said.
The announcement was made in a press conference at the California Department of Justice building on Tuesday. Bonta also said in that conference that much of Trump’s actions as president in his second term have been unlawful, prompting a flurry of lawsuits that the California Attorney General filed against the federal government, often joined by other states attorneys general.
“He has been blatant and brazen in his unlawfulness, he has been consistent and frequent in his violations of the law and his trampling over the Constitution,” Bonta said. “Over the last year and a half, we have taken Trump and his administration to court 82 times. Not because we want to – we’d rather be suing him zero times.”
Follow-up calls and emails went unreturned to the California Department of Justice, in which The Center Square asked for a fuller breakdown and justification of how Bonta came up with the $207.1 billion savings for Californians.
A bill passed last year, SBX1-1, authorizes the California Department of Finance to appropriate $25 million to defend the state against actions taken by the federal government, according to a Department of Justice report. The Department of Justice has so far gotten $19.2 million of that money. That report also said that the roughly $19 million has contributed to but not sufficiently covers the cost of litigation against the federal government since Trump was re-elected to the White House.
Approximately 83% of the time, Bonta said, the California Department of Justice prevailed in their lawsuits. Bonta secured 21 final orders siding with California, 45 orders granting early relief, and eight cases where the Trump administration settled, Bonta said. All those cases played out across multiple levels of the judiciary system, including in trial court, appellate court and in the U.S. Supreme Court, he added.
Some of those cases challenged the Trump administration on a $10 billion funding freeze to childcare and family assistance programs in California and four other states. Other legal challenges targeted the federal government’s actions on tariffs, the deployment of the National Guard and birthright citizenship, among other issues according to an annual report from the California Department of Justice.
“The Golden State has long set the precedent on what it means to defend civil liberties on the state and the federal level,” Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, said at the press conference. “We must put an end to the federal overreach that puts lives at risk, tramples on our Constitutional rights and creates uncertainty across our communities.”
Assemblymember Natasha Johnson, R-Lake Elsinore, said she would rather see efforts go towards finding funding for measures like Prop. 36, a 2024 public safety measure that has received little to no new funding in the last two years.
“I don’t want to see any cases, period,” Johnson said on Tuesday. “I think staff is spending time on reports and cost savings, and at the end of the day, I want to make it very clear that the will of the voters has to be fully funded. We shouldn’t be fighting the government. We should be funding Prop. 36.”
