One week this summer put the transformation of American federalism on display. On July 17, a district court ruled for 24 states that the Trump administration had unlawfully canceled billions of dollars for schools, health programs, and scientific research. Days earlier, the Department of Energy acknowledged that it had cut hundreds of green-energy grants to blue states “based solely” on their political identity. And days later, 25 states sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency for its decision to condition disaster-preparedness money on states’ willingness to enforce federal immigration law and redesign their elections to suit the president.
At first blush, these suits might look like classic federalism fights. But a closer examination shows something different. The states’ opponent is not the federal government as a whole but an executive branch acting alone — imposing conditions Congress never authorized, canceling grants Congress established, wielding money to punish political opponents. The states’ strongest arguments accordingly sound in statutory interpretation and the separation of powers, not traditional federalism doctrine.
The shift in state resistance toward constraining executive power is the most important story of contemporary federalism. Federalism’s anti-commandeering and anti-coercion rules still matter: when the federal government tries to make states do something they don’t want to do, these doctrines work as a powerful shield. But the second Trump administration has quickly revealed the doctrines’ limits. Anti-commandeering and conditional spending rules depend on a basic premise: that the federal government works through the states to get things done. When it doesn’t — when the administration stops funding programs altogether or when it builds its own law enforcement apparatus instead of relying on local police — states need a different set of tools.
Commandeering
The anti-commandeering doctrine holds that the federal government may not give orders to the states. Congress cannot force a state legislature to pass or repeal a law. The president cannot require state police to enforce federal mandates. Federal administrators cannot demand that state agencies carry out federal programs. Cooperation must be voluntary.
The Supreme Court has applied the doctrine in only a handful of cases. It first expressly recognized the principle in 1992, striking down a congressional requirement that states adopt particular legislation. Five years later, it confirmed that the principle covers state executives as well as legislatures, invalidating a federal requirement that local law enforcement officers perform background checks on gun buyers. Later cases clarified that the rule does not apply when Congress evenhandedly regulates states and private actors, but that it bars federal commands precluding state action as well as commands requiring it.
Though sparingly applied, the anti-commandeering rule shapes federal-state relations. It means that the federal government may regulate individuals directly, but it may not conscript the states. And it has given states a powerful tool to push back against Washington.
The clearest example from the last decade concerns immigration enforcement. The federal government has broad power over immigration, but it has long relied on state and local police to identify, detain, and transfer people to federal custody. States and cities that oppose federal immigration policy have adopted “sanctuary” policies limiting this cooperation, turning the federal government’s practical reliance on the states against it.
When the first Trump administration tried to force cooperation, states invoked the anti-commandeering principle, and they generally prevailed. The federal government could enforce federal law, courts reasoned, but it could not force states to help. The Ninth Circuit, for example, rejected the federal government’s challenge to the California Values Act, which restricts state and local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration authorities.
The anti-commandeering principle remains vital today. From the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump has again targeted sanctuary jurisdictions, issuing executive orders that seek to end sanctuary policies and punish the states that adopted them. Anti-commandeering doctrine continues to protect these state choices.
It also protects state control over state officials. In an early second-term executive order, Trump suggested that state law enforcement should follow his instructions rather than state law, deriding “legal and political handcuffs” and seeking to “unleash” state police from state control. But the president cannot cut state officials loose from their states. Because states operate through their officials, the power to decline cooperation with the federal government includes the power to forbid state officials from cooperating.
Coercion
If the Constitution bars direct commands, what about other forms of pressure — above all, money? States depend heavily on federal funds, which support everything from schools to healthcare to transportation. That dependence suggests an obvious workaround to anti-commandeering: Washington has no need to issue orders if it can issue monetary threats instead.
To guard against such abuse, the Supreme Court has limited how the federal government may use spending to influence state policy. Conditions on federal funds must be clear, so states know what they are agreeing to. They must relate to the program being funded, so Washington cannot use its vast power of the purse to dictate state policy across the board. They may not induce states to violate other constitutional provisions. And at some point, financial pressure can become so extreme that it crosses the line into unconstitutional coercion. The Court first enforced this “anti-coercion” principle in its 2012 decision on the Affordable Care Act, which offered states funds to expand Medicaid but threatened states that declined with the loss of all their existing Medicaid funding. Such leveraging, the Court held, effectively amounted to commandeering.
Conditional spending doctrine, like anti-commandeering, has protected the states from certain Trump abuses. When the first Trump administration threatened to withhold federal law enforcement grants from sanctuary states, for example, courts widely rejected the move. The administration could not commandeer sanctuary states directly, and it could not use financial pressure to force them into submission either.
The doctrine performs similar work today. Courts have rejected the second Trump administration’s attempts to condition unrelated funding streams on immigration cooperation. When the Department of Transportation declared that all transportation funding would hinge on state cooperation with immigration enforcement, the judiciary readily recognized the violation. The new FEMA conditions — holding disaster-preparedness money hostage to immigration cooperation and federally prescribed election rules — invite the same fate.
But these cases also reveal something that spending doctrine alone does not capture and that cuts to the core of today’s federal overreach: the conditions were imposed by the executive branch unilaterally. Because Congress holds the power of the purse, the question is not only whether conditions are coercive or unrelated but also whether the executive had authority to impose them at all.
Beyond Federalism
Although the anti-commandeering and anti-coercion doctrines are important, they have built-in limits. Both doctrines assume that the federal government relies on state assistance. But what happens if the federal government sidelines the states instead of ordering them around?
Anti-commandeering doctrine does not prevent federal officials from acting on their own. It does not stop federal immigration agents from enforcing federal law within state borders, for example; it only stops Washington from ordering state officials to assist. Anti-coercion doctrine, likewise, restrains the federal government when it uses money to pressure the states. It does not stop the federal government from simply cutting off funding.
These constraints did not matter so much when the federal government tried to bring states into federal governance, as was the norm until recently. But the second Trump administration has made the limits of anti-commandeering and anti-coercion doctrine readily apparent.
The administration has dramatically expanded federal enforcement capacity. It has sharply increased the size of ICE and reassigned other federal agents to immigration patrols. It has shifted attention from the border to the country’s interior, treating enforcement as a show of force against entire cities. As the Trump administration builds what is effectively a federal police force, federalism doctrine offers little help. Anti-commandeering protects states from being conscripted. It does not protect them from being cut out.
Similarly, the most serious funding harms to states today come not from coercive conditions but from outright cancellation. The administration has terminated a wide range of grants — for education, public health, environmental programs, and more. These cutoffs have severe and destabilizing consequences, but they don’t fit the anti-coercion framework. That doctrine polices offers states cannot refuse; it says nothing about a government that stops making offers altogether. There is no general constitutional right to federal funding, and Congress may end programs as well as create them. If Congress were terminating these programs, then, states would have little recourse. But here, as in many other areas, the executive branch is acting without Congress. That creates other grounds for resistance.
Challenging the Executive
Today’s most serious threats to the states come from unilateral exercises of executive power, not from federal lawmaking. Those threats are therefore also, in many cases, violations of statutes and separation of powers principles. And when the federal executive acts without Congress, states are well situated to fight back. Even if Congress will not defend its own programs and authorities, states can challenge executive violations and protect themselves at the same time.
States have already filed scores of lawsuits targeting the administration’s failure to follow federal law. Each of this summer’s cases about funding provides an illustration. But even a more visceral encroachment on state power — last year’s deployment of the National Guard over governors’ vigorous objections — was ultimately checked not by a constitutional federalism rule but by the states’ argument that the president had exceeded his statutory authority. States have also begun using their own lawmaking authority to hold federal executive actors accountable for unlawful acts by, for example, authorizing suits for federal actors’ violations of federal constitutional rights.
In litigation and legislation alike, it is states’ deep integration with the federal government that enables these challenges. This departs from the traditional picture of separate state and federal spheres. Today, most areas of domestic policy — environmental protection, law enforcement, healthcare — are shared enterprises. Federal programs depend on state administration; state programs rely on federal funding and expertise.
That integration cuts both ways. It creates vulnerability: states have much to lose when Washington cuts them off. But it also creates opportunity. Because states are embedded in federal programs, they can challenge executive violations of the laws governing those programs, and they often have the expertise, if not always the resources, to replicate federal programs on their own or through interstate collaboration.
Anti-commandeering and anti-coercion principles remain central features of modern federalism. They preserve state control over state institutions and guard against federal commands and certain financial threats. But their limits are now visible. Both presume that the federal government needs state assistance to get things done. They are less equipped to address a federal executive that acts on its own.
Yet the very integration that makes states vulnerable also gives them different tools. States can challenge unlawful executive action, insist that federal statutes be followed, and step into governance gaps. This summer’s lawsuits illustrate: states should win because these fights about federal money are at bottom fights about lawless executive activity. The constitutional protection of state autonomy increasingly depends on doctrines that are not, strictly speaking, federalism doctrines at all.
