Attorneys general have worked for months to craft legal opposition to the president’s agenda. Now they’re putting it into practice.

The directive was sweeping and unprecedented: Early in the evening of Jan. 27, the White House Office of Management and Budget ordered a temporary freeze on trillions of dollars in federal funding.

As chaos and panic erupted across the government, Democratic attorneys general from more than 20 states convened a staff call. The White House move was unlawful, they decided.

Lawyers from six states — New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Illinois and California — worked through the night to draft a complaint. By the next day, they had filed the 44-page document in federal court, one of two lawsuits that within days had blocked the administration’s move temporarily.

The scope of the White House memo was “what made it so scary,” said Matthew Platkin, New Jersey’s attorney general. The Medicaid payment system briefly stopped working and states didn’t know if they could fund crucial programs like home heating assistance. The prevailing sentiment among the Democratic officials, Platkin said, was that “people are going to get killed if we don’t step in.”

Amid a barrage of executive orders from President Trump and dramatic steps by billionaire Elon Musk to downsize the federal government, Democratic attorneys general have emerged as the new administration’s most persistent — and effective — adversaries.

While congressional Democrats who lack control of either chamber have struggled to respond to Trump’s first weeks, state attorneys general have marched into court, pledging to rein in an administration intent on pushing the limits of presidential power.

Their role echoes the efforts by their Republican counterparts to block the Biden administration, and Obama’s before that. And it builds on Democratic efforts during Trump’s first term — although, they say, this time the stakes are higher and they’re better prepared.

In the past month alone, multistate coalitions have sued the Trump administration seven times, challenging actions such as an order to end birthright citizenship and Musk’s push to access sensitive Treasury Department data. In all but one of those cases, judges have issued orders restraining the Trump administration from proceeding.

The quick and coordinated pushback from Democratic attorneys general is the product of months of planning and regular consultations since Trump’s inauguration, 10 of them said in interviews. They speak on a near-daily basis, gathering on Zoom to give updates on the status of cases and hash out legal strategy.

Many of the Trump administration’s current moves were telegraphed well in advance — including in the conservative blueprint known as Project 2025 — and the attorneys general began preparing to challenge them last year. But other actions have taken them by surprise, such as the blitzkrieg by Musk and the U.S. DOGE Service — the Department of Government Efficiency — across federal agencies.

With each passing day, Musk committed “in our view, a new violation, a new betrayal of trust with the American people,” said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. The culture of “move fast and break things” may work in Silicon Valley, where Musk made his fortune, Torrez said. But “it’s not good governance and it’s unconstitutional.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that all the president’s executive actions are “lawful, constitutional and intended to deliver on the promises he made to the American people.” She blasted the wave of court challenges as the work of “partisan elected officials and judicial activists” who are defying the will of voters.

“The Trump administration is prepared to fight these battles in court and will prevail,” Leavitt said.

The attorneys general, the top law enforcement officers in their states, have a unique ability to challenge federal actions in court, said James Tierney, a lecturer at Harvard Law School and former attorney general of Maine. Their lawsuits play “a vital role, an emergency role,” Tierney said.

But the lawyers also know that “Donald Trump is the president of the United States,” Tierney said. “They’re not going to sue their way out of it.”

Last week, about a dozen of the nation’s 23 Democratic attorneys general gathered in Los Angeles for their first in-person meeting since the inauguration. Although only three weeks had passed, the pace of their work made it feel more like “two or three years,” Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul said.

Torrez of New Mexico said his days now routinely begin at 3:30 a.m. Platkin of New Jersey said he speaks to some of his counterparts more often than he speaks to his wife — whose recent birthday dinner was interrupted by another Trump administration move that prompted him to jump on the phone with colleagues.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta remembered what Letitia James, his counterpart in New York, had told him after he was appointed to the role in 2021. James took office in 2019 and led legal challenges during the first Trump administration.

She welcomed Bonta to the club, he said, then told him: “Your predecessor and I, during Trump 1.0, we were the bookends defending democracy. Do you want to be a bookend defending democracy?”

“I’m like, ‘Yeah, Tish, I want to be a bookend defending democracy,’” Bonta, smiling, said in an interview.

While the Democratic officials said they had hoped that Trump would not return to the White House, they also began to prepare well before the November election. At a meeting in Seattle early last year, Bob Ferguson — then attorney general of Washington and now the state’s governor — welcomed his colleagues with an impassioned reminder of the start of Trump’s first term. Within a week, the president had issued a travel ban on several Muslim-majority nations, a measure that two states sprinted to challenge in court.

Ferguson’s message was, “This is really important, and you need to be ready,” said Ellen Rosenblum, the former attorney general of Oregon.

A smaller group of Democratic attorneys general met in New York early last spring and agreed that their offices would commit resources to the contingency planning. Soon after, their top aides, on a retreat, began drafting a coordinated response.

Later in 2024, teams from across the country began mapping out areas of responsibility and sharing which actions they thought would be most likely during the first months of a second Trump administration, several attorneys general said. In some cases, they drafted legal documents to hold in a “brief bank,” ready to be pulled out if necessary.

A key guide was Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s road map for a second Trump administration. Platkin printed out the document, and as he read it flagged certain sections for others.

The preparation paid off. The attorneys general pulled their challenges to Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order canceling birthright citizenship “right off the shelf,” Bonta said. The next day, two multistate coalitions filed lawsuits challenging the order, one in Washington and one in Massachusetts. On Jan. 23, a judge in Seattle issued a temporary restraining order, saying the administration’s move was “blatantly unconstitutional.” On Feb. 13, a judge in Boston granted a preliminary injunction.

Before President Barack Obama’s second term, state lawyers were comparatively restrained and unsophisticated when it came to suing the federal government, said Paul Nolette, a political scientist at Marquette University who tracks such actions.

That began to change, he said, when coalitions of Republicans started challenging Obama’s policies. The numbers soared during Trump’s first term: Democratic attorneys general filed 155 multistate lawsuits against the federal government, a record. During Joe Biden’s term, Republicans launched 114 suits.

For officials with their own political ambitions, the incentives to launch lawsuits against the president of the opposing party are clear, Nolette said. Beyond potentially blunting the impact of policies, the moves can raise a state officeholder’s profile.

“I don’t think there are any downsides,” Nolette said. “Even if you lose the case, you can say, ‘I fought Trump or Biden.’ Basically, it’s all plus.”

The state attorneys general have kept an ear out for reactions from their constituents. When Musk sought to gain control of sensitive government payment systems, the outcry from voters was enormous, several attorneys general said, with people terrified about their government payments and their private information.

Some Democratic officials said they realized that they had to prioritize that lawsuit and move quickly, despite an internal debate over whether they would have a stronger case if they waited and were able to gain more visibility into what the DOGE team was doing. On Feb. 7, 19 states sued the Trump administration. The next day, a federal judge in New York issued a restraining order.

Another move took the state officials by surprise: the Trump administration’s decision to slash grants by the National Institutes of Health, cutting billions of dollars in funding to universities and research centers. “We were shocked,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell. Three days later, 22 states sued — and a judge temporarily blocked the move in those states that same afternoon.

The current coordination among Democratic officials is deeper and more organized than during Trump’s first term, said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, who took office in 2019.

While states such as California and New York — which have the largest offices in the country, staffed by legions of attorneys — often take the lead, their smaller counterparts are also contributing.

“I don’t have 30 lawyers that I can throw at a case,” Neronha said. “But the four or five I can throw at it are as good as anybody.”

Torrez of New Mexico said he would prefer to focus on issues that are more typical of his job, such as civil rights and consumer protection, rather than suing the federal government. But the cases that he and his colleagues are bringing against the Trump administration, Torrez said, are “the most important work I’ll ever do in public life.”

Trump should follow the lead of his Republican predecessors who respected the limitations of the presidency, Torrez said. “If that happens,” he said, “We are happy to go back to our normal work.”