Newsom Sues Doge Over Americorps Cuts, Saying It ‘gives The Middle Finger To Volunteers’

SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom announced late Thursday that California will sue the Trump administration over the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to AmeriCorps.

It’s the Golden State’s second lawsuit against the White House in as many days.

The Trump administration placed all but a handful of senior AmeriCorps employees on leave on Wednesday as DOGE pursues sweeping spending cuts across the agency that deploys thousands of volunteers across the nation each year. Newsom cast the slashing as an affront to not only those workers, but to America as a whole.

“We’ve gone from the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society to a federal government that gives the middle finger to volunteers serving their fellow Americans,” Newsom, a Democrat, said in a prepared statement.

The lawsuit comes one day after Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta made California the first state to sue Trump over tariffs in an aggressive move to challenge the president’s sweeping actions. California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, stands to lose billions to tariffs with major state industries from Silicon Valley to agriculture heavily dependent on global trade.

In announcing the lawsuit challenging the cuts to AmeriCorps, Newsom’s team framed the reductions — amid a lofty quote from the late President John F. Kennedy — as a competing and inferior agenda for the country’s emergency response.

“DOGE’s actions aren’t about making government work better — it’s about making communities weaker,” Newsom’s chief service officer Josh Fryday said in a statement. “These actions will dismantle vital lifelines in communities across California.”

Newsom and the California Legislature earlier this year set aside $25 million for Bonta’s Justice Department to sue the Trump administration, and the state has already forwarded more than a dozen legal challenges during Trump’s second term.