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Four city and county governments, led by Nashville and the county where it’s located, sued the Trump administration Monday over election security-related mandates placed on grants to combat terrorism.
“FEMA has no authority to impose those conditions — not under its governing statute and not under the Constitution,” the suit argues. “Congress authorized FEMA to help jurisdictions protect critical infrastructure from terrorist and cyberattacks. It did not authorize FEMA to decide who may vote, how ballots must be counted, or how states maintain their voter rolls. Never before has FEMA purported to regulate how states and counties run elections. Such a transformative assertion of federal authority in an area of traditional state control requires clear congressional authorization that FEMA does not have. The power to administer elections belongs to the states, subject only to conditions imposed by Congress — not the President, not the Secretary of Homeland Security, and not FEMA.”
A group of cities and counties alleges the Trump administration is threatening to withhold anti-terrorism funding unless they adopt strict election rules.
The Texas counties of El Paso and Harris, as well as the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County and the City of Columbus, are suing the Department of Homeland Security, according to a news release from the Brennan Center for Justice, one of the organizations representing the group.
El Paso County and Harris County on Monday sued the Department of Homeland Security alongside communities in Tennessee and Ohio over new requirements for federal grants that they argue undermine election security and public safety.
“If that’s going to be a regular occurrence, then we have a real fundamental threat to the rule of law,” said Cerin Lindgrensavage, a former Justice Department lawyer who works for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that fights against authoritarianism. “Congress has said spend the money, and the president doesn’t want to. The question is, who wins? Under the law, Congress is supposed to win. Right now, the president is.”
Newsom’s claims fit within a documented pattern of DOJ investigations targeting Trump’s political opponents. According to Protect Democracy, a nonprofit that tracks such actions, the Trump administration has targeted dozens of political opponents with criminal charges, with most cases failing. The organization’s tracker shows at least 31 entries as of mid-June 2026.
Schumer last week convened a slate of experts that included former Attorney General Eric Holder, prominent Democratic election attorney Marc Elias, election-law expert Norman Eisen and the heads of the left-leaning legal group Democracy Forward and the nonpartisan, nonprofit Protect Democracy. They helped senators prepare for a trio of possible scenarios and boost coordination with state and local leaders who directly oversee election administration and voter turnout operations.
“Allowing agencies to withhold funds, or to pick winners and losers outside of the process outlined in law, is a problematic erosion of the fundamental principle in our Constitution that Congress has the power of the purse,” Cerin Lindgrensavage ’06, a counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that advocates for stronger democracy in the United States, said in a Zoom interview. “The law is what should govern how these funds are used and not any single opinion of a bureaucrat at the OMB or NSF.”
“There’s a lot of guesswork that the public has to do, and frankly shouldn’t have to do, about exactly who is being moved and what work is now deemed ‘policy-influencing’ in the way that they’re using that phrase,” Jules Torti, counsel for Protect Democracy, said in an interview. “We’re hearing from civil servants that they don’t know their position description number, and many of them have not yet been told whether or not they’ve been moved. There is a lot of confusion about exactly what this means.”
In California, each of those counties decides how much to spend on election operations, creating major differences in their capacity to count ballots, said Ben Gips, who works on state voting policy for Protect Democracy.
Large counties such as Los Angeles and Orange have invested in equipment and staffing that typically allow them to finish counting more than 90 percent of ballots within a week of an election. Other counties can take three or four weeks.
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