LANSING, Mich. (WZMQ) – When President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel didn’t wait long to respond. Within months, her office had filed or joined dozens of lawsuits challenging federal actions on everything from education funding and public health to immigration, environmental regulations, and election administration.
She now has more than 55 legal challenges on the books. But she’s far from alone.
Across the country, Democratic attorneys general have mounted an aggressive legal campaign against the Trump administration, continuing a pattern that constitutional law experts say has been building for more than two decades, regardless of which party holds the White House.
“Really it’s something that picked up much more in the Obama administration, where you had attorneys general of parties opposite the president who were filing lawsuits against agency and other executive actions,” said Quinn Yeargain, a constitutional law professor at Michigan State University.
Republican AGs challenged Obama. Democrats challenged Trump in his first term. Republicans challenged Biden. And now the cycle continues.
What’s changed, Yeargain says, is scale and sophistication. States have emerged as some of the most powerful actors in federal court, in part because they can clear a legal bar that stops many individuals cold: standing.
“They’re oftentimes able to bring lawsuits because they have standing,” Yeargain said. “Individual plaintiffs may not have standing themselves.”
That legal leverage has translated into real dollars for Michigan. According to Nessel’s office, the litigation has helped protect more than $3.4 billion in funding for state programs covering education, health care, disaster relief, and more that could have been cut or clawed back by the federal government.
Nessel has been direct about her motivation. “I will not stand idly by while the Trump administration threatens the well-being of Michigan residents and upends the rule of law,” she said in a statement accompanying the latest update to her office’s Federal Actions Tracker, a public database documenting each case.
The lawsuits have sparked political backlash in Lansing. House Republicans have criticized Nessel’s approach, and the House Oversight Committee has been conducting its own investigation into her office over unrelated allegations of ethical misconduct, claims her office has denied.
But Yeargain cautions against viewing the litigation as purely partisan theater. High-profile federal challenges, he notes, represent only a fraction of what attorneys general actually do day to day.
“I would say this is probably a very small sliver,” he said. “The attorney general has expansive authority in a variety of areas.”
In Michigan, that means consumer protection cases, environmental enforcement, criminal prosecutions, and representing the state across a wide range of legal matters.
The Federal Actions Tracker currently lists active and ongoing cases spanning federal funding, civil rights, public health, and more, a running log of one state’s resistance and a window into how the relationship between states and the federal government continues to be tested and reshaped in court.
