The Trump administration is no longer even bothering to pretend that it isn’t targeting only blue states with funding cuts. Instead, the president and his goons are going for open warfare.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will be cutting off over $10 billion in funds to five states: California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. Those states will lose $7 billion in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families funds, known as TANF.
They’ll also lose almost $2.4 billion in grants from the Child Care Development Fund. Oh, and also $870 million in social services grants.
Why is this happening? Well, all the fraud, of course! No, you can’t see any evidence, but according to HHS, since the GOP managed to gin up a moral panic over alleged fraud in Minnesota, President Donald Trump and his administration are now entitled to cut off funding anywhere else they like—and what they like is hurting blue states.
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The administration also likes hurting low-income families, which is why it’s targeting programs that fund services for hundreds of thousands of poor people. That’s just a little bonus that comes along with attacking states run by those Trump perceives as enemies to be crushed, rather than states in the union that have all the same rights and privileges as states run by Republicans.
Also a little bonus? Driving Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz out of the 2026 gubernatorial race by insisting that he somehow masterminded a widespread immigrant-led fraud scheme.
There’s no attempt by Trump and his henchmen to justify their choice of these five states. Indeed, the only justification offered is that they are run by Democrats.
“Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” claimed a Health and Human Services spokesperson. “Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes.”
Somehow the administration isn’t interested in scrutinizing actual, factual documented fraud in red states like, say, Mississippi. Remember when multimillionaire NFL star Brett Favre participated in a scheme to fleece the poorest residents of that state out of over $6 million in welfare funds?
The retired football player took $1.1 million for speeches he never gave and made sure to steer $5 million in funds to the University of Southern Mississippi to build a volleyball court for his daughter’s team to play on. Favre did that with the exuberant assistance of former Mississippi GOP Gov. Phil Bryant.
What program did Favre and Bryant fraudulently divert money from? You guessed it: TANF. But that’s a red state and a Trump-friendly weirdo football player, so it’s all good.
This targeting of blue states isn’t new. During the 2025 government shutdown, the administration took aim at the bluest locations in the bluest states with surgical precision. For example, Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, represented by Ilhan Omar, and the 4th Congressional District, represented by Betty McCollum, saw over $500 million in grant cancellations. At the same time, all red states nationwide saw only $1 billion in cuts.
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Overall, Trump used the shutdown to cancel or freeze almost $28 billion in aid for almost 200 projects in Democrat-led cities. The administration’s take on this is that it is totally constitutional for the federal government to withhold money from states based on partisan politics because “it can serve as a proxy for legitimate policy considerations.”
That’s word salad, but it’s word salad that the Department of Justice was willing to put in writing in a court filing.
This stance would likely be news to the nation’s founders, what with the whole federalism thing and all, and also raises this question: If withholding money based on partisan preferences is permissible, why can’t blue states simply refuse to fill the federal coffers based on the same rationale?
The problem here, of course, is that unless Congress or the Supreme Court steps in and restores the balance of federalism, the administration will continue stripping blue states bare. An entire political funding ecosystem based on Trump’s personal animus is a helluva thing.
