Limitations on transgender health care. Threats to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds. The tumultuous whipsaw of on-again, off-again tariffs.
Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January and unfurled a flurry of executive orders and directives, Colorado has joined with blue-state allies to file 20 lawsuits challenging those and other actions — a rate of more than one suit per week. It’s a litigious streak outpaced only by Trump’s blistering spree of executive orders and the Republican’s unprecedented attempts to pull the nation’s purse strings to his chest.
Colorado’s top elected lawyer, two-term Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser, is no stranger to litigation against Trump: Weiser’s office sued the president and his administration at least 11 times during both men’s first terms. Just four months into Trump’s second term, Weiser has already surpassed that total, and he argues that the “level of lawlessness” is unprecedented.
“We’ve had to essentially stretch ourselves as a department to keep doing what I’ll call our normal work, as the people’s lawyer,” he said in an interview last week. Then there’s what he calls the “abnormal” task of the Trump era — “an unprecedented situation of being a constant evaluator of, ‘Is this action harming Colorado and is this action illegal?’ ”
“So we ask those two questions again and again and again,” Weiser said. “And 20 times, I’ve had to say: ‘Yes, it is.’ ”
So fast and furious have the executive orders come — with lawsuits often following quickly — that when The Denver Post asked Weiser’s office about the total number of cases, Weiser’s spokesman Lawrence Pacheco hedged his accounting.
A 21st suit might come before the end of the week, he warned Tuesday. (As of Friday afternoon, it hadn’t yet been filed.) The 19th and 20th cases had each been filed on Tuesday, both of them challenging attempts to withhold federal funding unless states cooperated with immigration enforcement.
The risk to the state is real: Hundreds of millions of dollars in various types of funding bound for Colorado — for vehicle charging stations, public health grants, academic research and public-safety programs — have been frozen or threatened in recent months. The health grants alone amount to $230 million, Weiser and other state officials have said.
Other challenged presidential orders have sought to implement Trump’s agenda for elections and immigration, attempted to dismantle of the U.S. Department of Education and put limitations on gender-affirming care.
Colorado Republicans, meanwhile, have argued that the state’s aggressive approach to federal action puts more federal funding at risk. They have said that as the elected president, Trump has the right to steer the nation toward his policy objectives.
During the state legislative session that ended May 7, House Republicans repeatedly accused their Democratic colleagues of “poking the bear” by passing policies opposed by Trump and by establishing a $4 million fund to defend against federal action.
Minority Leader Rose Pugliese, the House’s top Republican, said Friday that she wanted to be less litigious and “to be careful continuing to put a target on Colorado’s back.”
“Maybe we can have more conversations (with the Trump administration), as opposed to litigation,” Pugliese said, “And that’s my concern, is that (the lawsuits) feel like more politically motivated.”
State AGs also targeted Obama, Biden
The partisan, multistate litigation filed in response to Trump’s orders is part of a growing trend that has oscillated depending on which party is in power, legal experts said.
Republicans first launched the practice under President Barack Obama. Then Trump’s first administration was sued 160 times, almost entirely by Democratic attorneys general, according to the independent tracker AttorneysGeneral.org. President Joe Biden was sued 122 times by multistate coalitions overwhelmingly dominated by Republicans.
“We’ve seen this huge shift for Democrat AGs in the states to fight against the Republican president, and vice versa,” said Doug Spencer, a constitutional law professor at the University of Colorado Law School.
There’s another political dimension, he said: Current Texas Gov. Greg Abbott filed “dozens and dozens” of lawsuits against Obama when Abbott was attorney general, helping spark the trend while raising his own profile. Weiser is now running for governor in Colorado’s 2026 election, when the seat will be open.
As congressional Democrats have struggled to combat Trump this year, attorneys general have represented a tangible — and effective — counter to the president for restless Democratic voters.
Still, Spencer argued that the rush of lawsuits against Trump had been driven more by Trump’s attempts to upend parts of the Constitution and the country.
“Trump himself has been issuing so many executive orders — if the goal is to keep pace and push back, substantively or politically, it’s hard to necessarily say (Democratic attorneys general) are turning up the dials,” he said. “I think they’re being reactive.”
Federal judges have blocked several Trump orders or administrative actions as a result of litigation in which Colorado’s involved.
A Massachusetts judge put a stop to the National Institutes of Health’s plan to cap research grants. A court in Maryland ordered the reinstatement of thousands of fired federal workers. And on Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments related to Trump’s order attempting to end birthright citizenship, which had been swiftly blocked in Massachusetts.
Other cases — like the two filed Tuesday or another one, challenging Trump’s tariffs — are still in their early stages.
Weiser’s office is taking the lead role on three of the 20 cases. Those are related to electric vehicle infrastructure funding, the termination of public health grants and the dismantling of AmeriCorps.
For the rest, the state has played a more supportive role.
Leader states take on the bulk of a case’s work, Weiser said, and the coalition’s members have discussed which office has the capacity and expertise for individual issues to determine who will take which role.
States’ rights ‘are going to be so important’
Preparation among the blue-state attorneys general began after the November election. Before Trump assumed office, Weiser’s office asked Colorado lawmakers for more money and employees.
Given the state’s budget shortfall, legislative staff initially recommended rejecting the request. An analyst wrote that Weiser’s office could just take a backseat to other states in the litigation, rather than lead.
But Democratic legislators eventually agreed to direct the funds to his office. Sen. Jeff Bridges, the chair of the Joint Budget Committee, said in March that while the request would result in rare growth in a year of cuts, it was “an investment … that will pay dividends in protecting a lot of the investments that we would lose from the federal government.”
Lawmakers also established the $4 million defense fund — which can be directed to Weiser’s office via Gov. Jared Polis — to combat federal action.
As for the AG’s stable of attorneys, “people are not getting paid more,” Weiser said Wednesday. “When you’re a lawyer in the Department of Law, you get a salary whether you’re working 40 or 45 hours a week, or 60 or 65 hours a week. We’ve had incredible willingness to step up and do that extra work.”
None of the Trump-challenging cases has been filed in a federal court based in Colorado. Eight have been filed in Massachusetts, and five more are in court in Rhode Island. The blue-state AGs — which also include those in Hawaii, Washington state, Illinois, New Jersey and California — discuss where to file the cases, Weiser said. That’s a mirror of the strategy in Republican-led suits that were often filed in Texas, where the district and appellate courts were favorable to conservative challenges.
“One of the realities we have to look at is, ‘Do we have judges — not just at the district court, but at the court of appeals — who are more hospitable or more hostile to the case?’ ” Weiser said.
The shift to attorneys general forming coalitions and suing the government has practical — along with partisan — benefits, Spencer said. Those offices typically have more resources and higher-caliber attorneys on staff. Courts often look at them with more deference and speed than private firms or groups that would otherwise file suit.
As a result, challenges of Trump’s orders have been met with swift hearings and injunctions, Spencer said.
Just look at Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court hearing: Normally, it takes years before a lawsuit climbs the judicial ladder and reaches the high court. But the birthright citizenship case — and an underlying question about the power of district judges to block orders across the entire country — reached the justices in a matter of months.
The next question, said Spencer and Siddhartha Rathod, a Denver civil rights lawyer, is whether Trump and the federal government will accept any court decisions that go against them.
“We will face this constitutional crisis, and I think we may already have, to some degree,” Rathod said. “And that’s why state rights are going to be so important. That’s why having strong attorneys general, strong governors is a matter of such importance.”
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