WASHINGTON (AP) — The deep cuts across federal agencies since Donald Trump’s return to the White House include reductions in force, which mean not only layoffs but also elimination of positions altogether.

Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced by agencies, including the Department of Education, which Trump has said he wants to eliminate altogether. Others have been part of plans shared with The Associated Press but not yet made public.

Here’s a look at reductions in force so far across federal agencies:

What is a ‘RIF’?

According to a White House memo sent to federal agencies in late February, each agency has until Thursday to develop a report on its plans to reduce its workforce, the results of which could be extensive changes in how government functions.

More plans are due April 14, when agencies are expected to outline how they will consolidate management and potentially relocate offices to parts of the country that are less expensive than Washington. These plans must be implemented by Sept. 30.

According to the Office of Personnel Management, agencies must follow guidelines set out in the Code of Federal Regulations when conducting reductions in force, including consideration for status as a veteran or total years of federal service. And, according to OPM, while each agency has the right to decide what positions are abolished, those regulations are what determine the specific employees included in the cuts.

Department of Education: 1,300 jobs

On Tuesday, officials announced plans to lay off more than 1,300 employees, raising questions about the agency’s ability to continue its usual operations. The department is also terminating leases on buildings in cities including New York, Boston, Chicago and Cleveland, officials said.

The department sent an email to employees Tuesday telling them its Washington headquarters and regional offices would be closed Wednesday and reopen Thursday, with the only reason given for the closures being unspecified “security reasons.”

Department officials said they would continue to deliver on key functions such as the distribution of federal aid to schools, student loan management and oversight of Pell Grants.

Trump has said he wants to dismantle the agency. His administration had already been whittling the agency’s staff, though buyout offers and the termination of probationary employees. After the cuts, the department will employ 2,183 people, according to a Tuesday news release.

Department of Veterans Affairs: 80,000 jobs

According to an internal memo obtained last week by AP, Veterans Affairs is planning an “aggressive” reorganization that includes cutting 80,000 jobs from the sprawling agency that provides health care for retired military members.

The VA’s chief of staff, Christopher Syrek, told top-level officials at the agency that it had an objective to return to 2019 staffing levels of just under 400,000. That would require terminating tens of thousands of employees after the VA expanded during the Biden administration, as well as to cover veterans impacted by burn pits under the 2022 PACT Act.

The memo instructs top-level staff to prepare for an agency-wide reorganization in August to “resize and tailor the workforce to the mission and revised structure.” It also calls for agency officials to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “move out aggressively, while taking a pragmatic and disciplined approach” to the Trump administration’s goals.

Veterans have already been speaking out against the cuts at the VA, which so far had included a few thousand employees and hundreds of contracts. More than 25% of the VA’s employees are veterans themselves.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: 1,000 jobs

The nation’s weather, ocean and fisheries agency on Tuesday began plans to lay off 10% of its current workforce, four people familiar with the matter told The AP.

Those cuts of about 1,000 positions follow earlier rounds of Trump administration firings and encouraged retirements at NOAA, plus the elimination of nearly all new employees last month. In all, the new round of reductions means that NOAA will have eliminated about one out of four jobs since Trump took office in January.

While most people know about NOAA and its daily weather forecasts, the agency also monitors and warns about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tsunamis, manages the country’s fisheries, runs marine sanctuaries, provides navigation information to ships and observes changes in the climate and oceans.

The agency also plays a role in warning about avalanches and space weather that could damage the electrical grid. It helps respond to disasters, including oil spills.

Internal Revenue Service: As many as 45,000 jobs

The IRS is drafting plans to potentially halve its workforce through a mix of layoffs, attrition and incentivized buyouts, two people familiar with the situation told The AP last week.

The federal tax collector employs roughly 90,000 workers total across the United States, according to the latest IRS data. Already, roughly 7,000 probationary IRS employees with roughly one year or less of service were laid off from the organization in February.

The organization also offered IRS employees — along with almost all federal employees across the government — “deferred resignation program” buyouts, though IRS employees involved in the 2025 tax season were told last month that they would not be allowed to accept a buyout offer from the Trump administration until mid-May, after the taxpayer filing deadline.

In addition to the planned layoffs, the Trump administration intends to lend IRS workers to the Department of Homeland Security to assist with immigration enforcement. In a letter sent in February, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to borrow IRS workers to help with ongoing immigration crackdown efforts.

This story will be updated as more RIFs become available ahead of a Thursday deadline.

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Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein, Fatima Hussein and Stephen Groves contributed to this report.

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Kinnard can be reached at http://x.com/MegKinnardAP

Meg Kinnard, The Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — At least three-quarters of South Carolina’s House members approved the more than 100 sections of the state’s $14 billion spending plan this week, but is wasn’t as easy as that makes it seem.

Harsh words were exchanged and members repeatedly interrupted discussions with accusations of breaching decorum or personal attacks as a small group of Republicans demanded massive cuts in spending, although often without details.

The spending plan passed on a 99-13 vote late Tuesday after nearly 20 hours of debate over two days. House members stayed until early Wednesday so they could formally send the budget to the Senate and go home for two weeks.

The budget arguments were in many ways a continuation of nearly every substantial debate in the South Carolina House this year. They had arguments over who are true Republicans followed by what most of the GOP and House leadership want easily passing.

The Freedom Caucus, made up of fewer than 20 representatives in the 124-member House, said it set out to cut $1 billion from the state’s 2025-26 fiscal year budget so it could drop South Carolina’s income tax rate from just over 6% to 5%. Republicans hold 88 of the seats.

“This is not just a trim. This is a fundamental reshaping of the way we think about government just as President Trump has proven in Washington,” said Freedom Caucus leader and Republican Rep. Jordan Pace of Goose Creek.

South Carolina’s Freedom Caucus hasn’t had the same success as similar groups in Western states. Wyoming’s Legislature passed most of the agenda for its Freedom Caucus, including a property tax cut. They’ve also had success in South Dakota preventing land from being taken for a pipeline. Many of their ideas have been echoed by President Donald Trump’s actions in his first months in office.

Freedom Caucus takes aim at education and agencies

Suggestions from the Freedom Caucus included ending tuition freezes at state colleges and slashing nearly the entire budget of agencies like the South Carolina Arts Commission, the state Human Affairs Commission and the Sea Grant Consortium.

Republican leaders said the budget was carefully crafted with input from Gov. Henry McMaster and weeks of hearings by the Ways and Means Committee.

Mainstream Republicans said the Freedom Caucus isn’t trying to run the government better but to make campaign speeches. They said the $1 billion in cuts was actually less than $100 million and took exception after Republican Rep. April Cromer of Anderson said the budget was “chock full of crap.”

House Majority Leader Davey Hiott responded: “Law enforcement is not crap to me. Our schoolteachers are not crap to me. Our disabled and special needs kids are not crap to me.” He added: “everyone that has a job and is paying state taxes is not crap to me.”

“The state of South Carolina deserves better than what we are seeing right now,” Hiott said to a standing ovation from most of the chamber, other than the Freedom Caucus members.

Proposed changes voted down, including one to prove a point

All the Freedom Caucus changes to the budget were voted down, including a suggestion by Republican Rep. Jay Kilmartin to cut 10 cents from the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism budget just to show they could cut money at an agency.

“This is real. I want to see if you can cut 10 cents,” Kilmartin said. “I thought a dollar was too much.”

Other Republicans pointed out earlier in the debate that the General Assembly and governor have worked to cut the income tax rate from 7% to 6.2% with a cut to at least 6% to come in this spending plan.

Plan addresses education costs and aftermath of Hurricane Helene

The highlights of the House spending plan include freezing tuition for in-state students currently in state universities but allowing schools to increase tuition for newcomers.

There is a $1,500 raise for all teachers increasing starting pay to $48,500 a year.

The state would pay $220 million to free up money from other places to pay for Hurricane Helene damage and $50 million to help the South Carolina Department of Transportation for what it spent to clear and repair roads after the storm that killed 49 people moved across the western part of the state.

And under the House plan, the state would pay an extra $89 million on health insurance premiums for state employees but for the first time in more than a decade won’t cover the entire cost, meaning state workers will have to pay more from their own pockets.

Jeffrey Collins, The Associated Press

DENVER (AP) — When President Donald Trump gave his joint address to Congress last week, he boasted that in his first few weeks back in the White House he had “brought free speech back to America.”

But First Amendment advocates say they’ve never seen freedom of speech under attack the way it has been in Trump’s second term.

Trump’s Republican administration has threatened Democratic members of Congress with investigation for criticizing conservatives, pulled federal grants that include language it opposes, sanctioned law firms that represent Trump’s political opponents and arrested the organizer of student protests that Trump criticized as “anti-Semitic, anti-American.”

“Your right to say something depends on what the administration thinks of it, which is no free speech at all,” said Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan First Amendment group.

Trump on Monday took credit for the arrest by immigration agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal permanent resident who helped lead pro-Palestinian protests there. Khalil’s lawyers say the government is targeting him for his activism and to “discriminate against particular viewpoints.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the administration will revoke the visas or green cards of supporters of Hamas, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization and denied that the policy threatened the First Amendment.

“This is not about free speech,” Rubio told reporters in Shannon, Ireland. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”

A federal judge earlier this week ordered immigration officials not to remove Khalil from the country while his case is sorted out.

“This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic, anti-American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it,” Trump wrote.

Targeting universities over language and demonstrations

Even some Trump allies were uncomfortable with that approach: “There’s almost no one I don’t want to deport,” wrote conservative commentator Ann Coulter on X, “but, unless they’ve committed a crime, isn’t this a violation of the first amendment?”

On the other end of the political spectrum, activists who organized to protest the war in Gaza were aghast at the administration’s move.

“We learn about our First Amendment rights since we’re children,” said Germán Rafael González, a member of Stanford University’s Students for Justice in Palestine. “But that is very much a myth. It’s not the reality we live in right now. And it’s scary.”

Prior to the arrest of Khalil over the weekend, the administration pressured Columbia University to crack down on anti-Israel activism among students and faculty, and Trump has threatened to go after any college that supports protests he deems “illegal.”

He also issued an order forbidding federal funding of what his administration labels diversity, equity and inclusion, which led to a freeze on federal grants as the administration reviews them for forbidden words such as “gender.”

Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, which sued the Trump administration over its DEI ban and won an injunction against it from a federal judge, said the administration is pulling funding from projects that have prohibited words, yanking grants from research into such areas as crop diversity or differences in infant mortality in urban and rural areas.

“Nobody really wants Big Brother telling you what you can research,” Wolfson said. “These are questions our country needs to know the answers to.”

‘The most serious of threats’ to free speech

Republicans for several years have been the party complaining about infringements on the First Amendment, from complaints about “woke” colleges canceling conservative speakers to bashing social media companies they accuse of censoring conservative viewpoints, including cutting Trump off after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. GOP-controlled Florida and Texas even drew up laws to limit how social media firms regulate content, though the U.S. Supreme Court kept them on hold last year because of possible First Amendment violations.

Last year, Trump positioned himself as a champion of the First Amendment during his campaign, and he signed an executive order just hours after being sworn into office prohibiting anyone in the federal government from interfering with Americans’ free speech rights. But he also made pledges that signaled he might oppose some of the First Amendment’s fundamental protections, such as deporting foreign students who protested Israel or outlawing flag-burning, which the Supreme Court has ruled is protected free speech.

Creeley, of the individual rights foundation, said he tried to be optimistic before Trump took office that the new president would fix some First Amendment issues. Instead, he said, it’s gotten worse.

“I cannot recall anything like this,” Creeley said. “I’ve been defending First Amendment rights since 2006, and this is the most serious of threats I can recall.”

Actions against media and lawyers to chill dissent

The Trump administration also has gone after the news media.

The president has sued several outlets for coverage he dislikes, and his appointees at the Federal Communications Commission have helped pressure those media companies. Meanwhile, Trump’s FCC is opening investigations of other media companies with which Trump has feuded, and the administration has barred The Associated Press from the White House press pool because it won’t use Trump’s preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico. The AP is suing to restore its access on First Amendment grounds.

The administration also has targeted law firms for their affiliations with Democrats or the previous administration. It stripped security clearances for lawyers at a firm that helped special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations of Trump during President Joe Biden’s administration and Perkins Coie, a longtime Democratic firm that Trump blames for the investigation into his campaign’s relationship with Russia during his first term. On Tuesday, Perkins Coie sued the administration to reverse the action, saying it violated the First Amendment and other constitutional guarantees.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, said the attacks on the law firms have scared some high-profile attorneys out of taking cases that challenge the administration, which, he contended, is the point.

“There’s a long tradition of lawyers taking on controversial clients, sometimes against our government,” Jaffer said. “The Trump administration has made it clear it will retaliate against lawyers.”

Jaffer said attacks on free speech and association are intended to chill dissent by convincing people in the opposition that they could become targets.

“All of us are able to participate in government by engaging in protest,” Jaffer said. “When the government shuts down that kind of speech, it’s shutting down democracy.”

‘I will not be silenced’

The Trump administration has even targeted members of Congress.

Trump appointed Ed Martin, a defense attorney who represented some of those charged in the Jan. 6 attack, as acting U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia. Martin wrote to Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader and one of the nation’s top Democrats, telling him that a comment he made in 2020 warning conservative Supreme Court judges they would “pay the price” for overturning the right to abortion could be seen as a threat. Schumer has since apologized for the statement.

Martin also wrote to Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia of California, warning him that comments he made about Trump adviser Elon Musk could be seen as a threat. Garcia had said Democrats should “bring actual weapons to this bar fight.”

“Members of Congress must have the right to forcefully oppose the Trump Administration,” Garcia replied on Musk’s X platform. “I will not be silenced.”

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Fernando reported from Chicago. Matt Lee in Shannon, Ireland contributed to this report.

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Nicholas Riccardi And Christine Fernando, The Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A former Republican Tennessee lawmaker says President Donald Trump has pardoned him two weeks into his 21-month prison sentence for an illegal campaign finance scheme that he pleaded guilty to in 2022, before he tried unsuccessfully to take back his plea.

Former Sen. Brian Kelsey announced that he received a “full and unconditional pardon” in a social media post Tuesday evening. He had been ordered to report to FCI Ashland’s minimum security satellite camp in Kentucky on Feb. 24. A federal database said Kelsey was no longer in Bureau of Prisons custody as of Tuesday.

“May God bless America, despite the prosecutorial sins it committed against me, President Trump, and others the past four years,” Kelsey said in the post.

The 47-year-old pleaded guilty in November 2022 to charges related to his attempts to funnel campaign money from his state legislative seat toward his failed 2016 congressional bid.

Kelsey was indicted in October 2021. He initially labeled the prosecution a witch hunt and blamed the Democratic administration of then-President Joe Biden. But when a co-defendant pleaded guilty the following October, Kelsey quickly did as well.

He repeated his attack on the Biden administration Tuesday, saying, “God used Donald Trump to save me from the weaponized Biden DOJ,” referring to the Department of Justice. In 2017, during Trump’s first term, Kelsey’s campaign finance dealings spurred a complaint by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center with the Federal Election Commission and the Department of Justice.

Kelsey was unsuccessful in his March 2023 attempt to rescind his guilty plea.

Kelsey had argued he entered the plea with an “unsure heart and a confused mind.” He noted that he and his wife had twin sons born in September 2022, and his father had terminal pancreatic cancer, then died in February 2023.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Nashville denied the change of plea in May 2023. He expressed disbelief that Kelsey, a Georgetown University-educated attorney and prominent former state senator, didn’t understand the gravity of pleading guilty.

Crenshaw later denied another challenge in which Kelsey accused prosecutors of violating his plea agreement. However, that September the judge also allowed Kelsey to stay out of prison until his appeal was decided. Kelsey’s challenge ultimately failed.

Last month, Crenshaw denied another motion to remain free by Kelsey, who argued he had ineffective legal counsel and that his claim of innocence is supported by recordings by two key witnesses — the co-defendant, Joshua Smith, and former GOP Rep. Jeremy Durham, who was not charged. The judge responded that Kelsey had given an “unconditional admission of guilt” under penalty of perjury.

Kelsey had another appeal pending as he announced the pardon.

Smith, a Nashville social club owner, pleaded guilty to one count under a deal that required him to “cooperate fully and truthfully.” He was sentenced to five years of probation.

The indictment alleges that Kelsey, Smith and others illegally concealed the transfer of $91,000 — $66,000 from Kelsey’s state Senate campaign committee and $25,000 from a nonprofit that advocated about legal justice issues — to a national political organization to fund advertisements urging support of Kelsey’s 2016 failed congressional campaign. The scheme caused the political group to file false campaign finance reports and make illegal, excessive campaign contributions to Kelsey, the indictment says.

Although the indictment does not name the national political organization, the Campaign Legal Center’s 2017 complaint said the American Conservative Union was making coordinated independent expenditures with Kelsey’s campaign. The American Conservative Union has said it has cooperated with investigators.

Kelsey, an attorney from Germantown, was first elected to the General Assembly in 2004 as a state representative. He was later elected to the Senate in 2009. He didn’t seek reelection in 2022.

Kelsey served as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees changes to civil and criminal laws, judicial proceedings and more. His law license was suspended in 2022 after his guilty plea.

Jonathan Mattise, The Associated Press

PHOENIX (AP) —

Days after Donald Trump was elected to a second term, Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs headed to the Mexican border with a conciliatory message.

“Border security was a core issue of the Trump campaign,” she said. “I look forward to having conversations with the incoming president about Arizona’s needs.”

Back in Phoenix, Attorney General Kris Mayes was plotting a legal strategy that has led so far to five lawsuits against the Trump administration, on average one every 10 days since she took office.

Both Hobbs and Mayes are Democrats who will seek reelection next year in a state that went for Trump. But they have adopted sharply different approaches to handling Trump’s return to the White House: Restrained and collaborative for Hobbs; hardened and embattled for Mayes.

The strategies encapsulate the debate consuming Democrats around the country trying to find a path back to power. In winning over working class voters, Trump scrambled political allegiances and left Democrats struggling to piece together a viable coalition.

Arizona’s two top elected officials are making different bets about what voters will be looking for next year. Hobbs and Mayes both narrowly won their offices in 2022. Mayes’ 280-vote victory was the closest in state history, and Hobbs won by less than 1 percentage point.

“I don’t think you can yield to authoritarian, anti-democratic behavior when it’s in the White House and when our country is in as much danger as it is right now,” Mayes said in a recent interview. “Our country has never been in this much peril since the Civil War.”

Hobbs declined an interview request. Her team issued a memo last week saying Arizona voters would see she “is serious about putting partisan politics aside to get things done.”

“They see her work with the Trump Administration and Republican Legislature when they share common goals, and they see her stand up to far-right proposals when they are out of touch with Arizona,” wrote Nicole DeMont, the governor’s chief political strategist.

The disparate approaches owe somewhat to their differing roles. As governor, Hobbs has to work with a Trump-friendly Republican legislature and may need to cajole the White House for federal assistance during Trump’s presidency. As attorney general, Mayes has the prerogative to fight in court.

Mayes is also prosecuting Trump aides and allies involved in his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

The dynamic is much the same in Michigan, another battleground state Trump won narrowly, where Democratic Attorney General Dana Nessel is aggressively confronting the Trump administration both legally and rhetorically, while Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has been more restrained.

Mayes and Nessel, both serving as the chief law enforcement officers of battleground states, have started a podcast together, “Pantsuits and Lawsuits.”

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom has been at times solicitous of Trump and Republicans as he pleads for disaster aid to recover from wildfires as Attorney General Rob Bonta sues.

To be clear, neither Hobbs nor Mayes could be mistaken for a Trump supporter. But their differing approaches began even before the election, when Mayes routinely appeared with Democrat Kamala Harris and her surrogates when they visited Arizona, while Hobbs kept her distance.

Mayes first sued Trump the day after he took office, when she joined a coalition of Democratic attorneys general suing to block an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.

Since then, she’s joined lawsuits challenging a blanket federal funding freeze, National Institutes of Health funding cuts, Elon Musk’s role atop the so-called Department of Government Efficiency and DOGE’s access to sensitive financial records at the U.S. Treasury.

She held a town hall meeting in Phoenix last week with the Democratic attorneys general from Minnesota, New Mexico Oregon, drawing hundreds of people concerned about Musk’s dismantling of the federal workforce.

“I would just like to see more accountability,” said Tatiana Johnson, a 24-year-old community organizer from Phoenix, who went to Mayes’ town hall. She’s skeptical that Mayes’ lawsuits will restrain Trump, but it matters to her to see someone fighting.

“It may not make a difference in the grand scheme of things of Trump actually listening to those, but it does make a difference to me,” Johnson said.

Hobbs, meanwhile, has been largely holding her fire, sometimes frustrating Democratic voters hungry for leaders to take on Trump.

Arizonans want strong leaders “who will stand up to a bully and who will protect our Constitution and their rights,” Mayes said. Voters repeatedly elected legendary Republican Sen. John McCain by wide margins, not because they always agreed with him but because “they knew he was fighting for them.”

“That’s what I’m betting on,” she said. “And we’ll find out in 2026 whether I’m right or wrong.”

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The Associated Press’ women in the workforce and state government coverage receives financial support from Pivotal Ventures. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

Jonathan J. Cooper, The Associated Press

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — When Missouri’s attorney general says he’ll seize Chinese-owned assets to force China to pay a $24.5 billion award won by the state in a lawsuit over COVID-19, the threat might be more important than actually collecting any money.

Similarly, when Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued Starbucks last month, alleging that the coffee shop chain with a white male CEO discriminated against white men in hiring, the point might have been less about winning in court than the fight itself. He’s attacking the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that liberals have championed and his Democratic counterparts have supported.

Over the past decade, state attorneys general have become increasingly visible for suing presidential administrations of the opposite political party and pursuing policy goals through warnings and public demand letters. They are not only their states’ top law enforcement officials but now also chief advocates for a variety of causes — and few seem as busy at it as Bailey.

“If you’re suing everybody, why not China?” said Benjamin Wittes, the editor-in-chief of the nonprofit Brookings Institution’s Lawfare publication.

Lower-profile offices become focused on national politics

For decades, attorneys general promised to fight crime by advocating tougher criminal sentences and defending convictions in serious cases while enforcing consumer protection laws and ousting the occasional errant local official.

They still do, but lawsuits and threats of lawsuits over national issues now get far more attention. Attorneys general argue that they’ve been pushed into it by presidents and federal agency heads.

North Dakota’s Drew Wrigley, a Republican, said environmental rules pursued under President Joe Biden compelled agricultural and energy-producing states like his to ask courts to force the Democratic administration to “respect appropriate constitutional and legal boundaries.”

“The Biden administration routinely abused executive authority, and regularly exercised power that Congress did not give them,” Wrigley said. “Our court victories have been victories for the rule of law in this nation.”

The shift started in the 1990s, when 46 attorneys general banded together to sue tobacco companies. A settlement led to annual payments to states exceeding $165 billion as of 2024.

“That was really what gave AGs the experience to realize that they could make a major difference on the national level, even if the executive branch and even if Congress didn’t act,” said Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political scientist.

Later, with Democrat Barack Obama in the White House, Republican attorneys general filed legal challenges against his administration. Democratic AGs did the same during Republican President Donald Trump’s first term.

“As the United States has become much more polarized, that’s been matched by the politicization of the attorney general’s office,” said Drury University political scientist Daniel Ponder.

Lawsuits may be derided but they reap political benefits

Critics deride such tactics as grandstanding, but attorneys general have incentives to pursue them.

In 2022, Democratic Attorney General Josh Shapiro won the Pennsylvania governor’s race after touting more than 20 legal challenges to Trump administration actions, and he was a leading contender for his party’s 2024 vice presidential nomination.

Kansas Republican Kris Kobach lost races for governor in 2018 and the U.S. Senate in 2020 but resurrected his political career in 2022 by winning the attorney general’s race after promising to spend each breakfast thinking about potential lawsuits against the Biden administration.

Bailey’s two predecessors in Missouri, both Republicans, won U.S. Senate seats: Eric Schmitt in 2022 and Josh Hawley in 2018. Bailey’s own headline-grabbing work helped him get an audience before Trump as a potential U.S. attorney general appointee, although ultimately he didn’t get the job.

He defended Missouri’s lawsuit against China — filed by Schmitt, his predecessor, and inherited by Bailey — by pointing to the result, though Wittes and other experts believe it will be difficult to seize assets and collect money from China. Missouri claimed that China hoarded personal protective equipment during the pandemic, harming the state.

“This historic victory is a significant first step in holding wrongdoers accountable,” Bailey said.

Missouri has had plenty of targets besides China

Of course, China is far from Missouri’s only target.

Bailey has threatened private gyms over bathroom policies, demanded that public schools ban drag shows and sued New York state, claiming that Trump’s 2024 hush money criminal trial was “overt meddling” in the election that limited Missouri voters’ information.

Bailey was in office less than three weeks in January 2023 when he joined a multistate lawsuit against the Biden administration over immigration policy, and the next day, he was challenging a policy allowing 401(k) managers to use environmental, social and governance principles in their investing. Missouri kept joining lawsuits against Biden’s administration: four over immigration policy, three over efforts to forgive college student loan debt, two over environmental rules, two over gun safety initiatives and two over transgender rights measures.

Even after Biden left the White House, Bailey wasn’t done with him.

In a Facebook post last week, Bailey called for the Trump administration to investigate Biden’s mental fitness late in his term and whether it undercut the “legality of executive orders, pardons, and all other actions issued in his name.”

Suing Starbucks: Diversity goals as alleged discrimination

Bailey’s lawsuit against Starbucks came weeks after Trump ordered an end to the federal government’s DEI programs.

The lawsuit alleges the company’s DEI programs are pretexts for quotas limiting the number of white, male employees, resulting in a “more female and less white” workforce since 2020, when CEO Brian Niccol, who is white, took over. Bailey argues that Starbucks practices, including actions against managers who don’t meet DEI goals, violate state and federal laws against making employment decisions based on race or sex.

“I have a responsibility to protect Missourians from a company that actively engages in systemic race and sex discrimination,” Bailey said.

Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment and has until April 7 to file its response to the lawsuit.

“Even if these suits are ultimately unsuccessful, they can have other effects in terms of changing behavior on the part of the defendants, in some cases delaying policy for a long time,” Marquette’s Nolette said.

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Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas. Associated Press writer Jack Dura also contributed reporting from Bismarck, North Dakota.

Summer Ballentine And John Hanna, The Associated Press