The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) are imposing unlawful conditions on federal funds to coerce states into complying with the federal administration's political agenda, Attorney General Nick Brown and a multistate coalition argued in a lawsuit filed today.

The coalition's lawsuit challenges decisions by FEMA and DHS to impose unlawful conditions on billions of dollars in federal funds that Congress appropriated for states to prepare for and respond to emergencies and natural disasters, including acts of terrorism. The conditions challenged in the lawsuit would require the states to change the way they conduct elections, including by transmitting lists of all registered voters to DHS, and to assist DHS in enforcing federal immigration law. They would also permit DHS to terminate any federal grant at any time and for any reason.

"Funding to protect Washingtonians from terrorism and catastrophe should not be subject to politics," Brown said. "It's the third time we've been forced to take these agencies to court to follow the law as Congress intended."

Brown joined two similar and successful lawsuits in 2025, challenging DHS's efforts to condition billions in federal emergency funding on states' agreement to enforce federal immigration law and DHS's subsequent attempt to unlawfully reallocate federal homeland security funding away from jurisdictions viewed as not supportive of the President's political agenda.

Now, DHS and FEMA have established grant conditions for 2026 funding that again attempt to unlawfully coerce the states into complying with the administration's policy priorities. The conditions affect billions of dollars in funding, including over a billion dollars in Homeland Security Grant Program (HSGP) funding that states use to support security measures and protect residents from terrorism, cyberattacks, and more. In recent years, Washington has received about $20 million in HSGP funding each year.

First, DHS and FEMA have again threatened to impose the same immigration conditions that they attempted to impose in 2025 on all federal grant programs, conditions that were found to be unlawful and were blocked by a district judge last year.

Second, DHS and FEMA threaten to withhold 20% of each state's counterterrorism funding if states do not change state election law to conform to the administration's unlawful effort to control voting. The attorneys general assert that these requirements would force states to abandon years of work and millions of dollars of investments into secure elections systems, all to obtain unrelated funding that Congress earmarked for the prevention of terrorist attacks.

Specifically, the challenged funding conditions include requiring states to conduct a mandatory 5% manual audit of voting systems, reconcile voters and ballots using a methodology DHS has not disclosed, and use DHS's Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system to verify the citizenship of every election worker and every registered voter in states' voter databases. If states do not comply, DHS and FEMA will withhold at least 20% of each state's HSGP funding.

Finally, the challenged funding conditions unlawfully claim unfettered power to terminate these grants on a whim. The agencies are attempting to add a condition that would allow FEMA to terminate any grant program for any reason. This constant threat of termination undermines the processes these critical programs rely on to be effective. A federal court recently rejected the Trump administration's attempts to interpret existing regulation in the same way.

The AGs argue in today's lawsuit that the grant conditions violate the Administrative Procedure Act and the U.S. Constitution's Spending Clause.

Joining Brown in filing the lawsuit are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaiʻi, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

A copy of the complaint is available here.

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