Could NC lose emergency-response funding for not following Trump’s election rules?

North Carolina is joining two dozen other states in suing the Trump administration, alleging the federal government is unlawfully threatening to strip counterterrorism and emergency response funding from the state if it doesn’t make certain changes to how it administers elections.

President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin are proposing to strip homeland security grant funding from states whose election rules don’t match Trump’s preferred policies, including some aimed at concerns over paper ballots, immigrants voting and more.

North Carolina and other states say that’s an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights that also threatens public safety.

The federal lawsuit, filed Thursday in Rhode Island, targets the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which falls under DHS. North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson announced his involvement in the lawsuit Monday, saying that the agencies are trying to give themselves more power to pull grants from states, including North Carolina, and need to be stopped.

“Hopefully they get the message: Don’t threaten our first responders unless you’re ready for a fight,” Jackson said in a news release.

One of the main issues is whether the federal government can withhold money from states that have rules for elections that the president dislikes. Trump is a Republican. Jackson is a Democrat, as are the leaders of the two dozen other states participating in the lawsuit.

A FEMA spokesperson defended the new rules for grant funding, telling WRAL: “We fully expected these left-wing politicians to oppose common-sense measures designed to protect election security and safeguard the integrity of American democracy.”

Regardless of the fight over the constitutionality of the new requirements, however, a State Board of Elections spokesman tells WRAL that North Carolina is already following most of the rules Trump wants — and could comply with the rest. 

The grants in question provide hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for everything from hurricane recovery and wildfire mitigation to bomb squad equipment, cybersecurity upgrades and search-and-rescue operations.

In addition to threatening to withhold grants from states that don’t adopt the election rules, the lawsuit says DHS also wants to give itself the power to take back grant money at any time and for any reason — even if it has already been distributed. 

Since the start of Trump’s second term government agencies have slashed billions of dollars in funding for states that hadn’t voted for Trump, the New York Times and Associated Press reported last week.

Trump and officials in his administration have targeted federal grants as part of broader efforts to reduce government spending, such as through his Department of Governmental Efficiency efforts that billionaire Elon Musk briefly led. DOGE and similar efforts unsuccessfully targeted grant funding for medical research, public schools and emergency preparedness — all of which North Carolina and other states sued to stop last year.

Jackson said even though the new effort to take away funding is being done through different mechanisms, and potentially for different reasons, the same principles are still at play.

“The last time they tried this, we took them to court and won,” Jackson said in a statement about the lawsuit, which includes 25 states and the District of Columbia. “Now they’re trying again, and I expect we’ll beat them — again.”

The lawsuit says the agencies “have imposed a set of radical new conditions regarding the states’ administration of elections. The Constitution grants the states the power to administer and set the rules governing federal elections. … Defendants, however, seek to upend those laws and policies and — using hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds as a cudgel — impose the current administration’s preferred policies in their place.”

FEMA told WRAL it’s well within its rights to do exactly that.

“Election security is national security, and protecting our critical infrastructure remains a top priority for the Trump Administration,” the agency spokesperson said. “Concerns over voting processes, data security, and registration practices have made it clear that action is required. This year, states must take critical, common-sense steps to protect U.S. elections before receiving their full Homeland Security Grant Program awards.”

The State Board of Elections, which administers elections in North Carolina, isn’t part of the lawsuit. But an agency spokesman told WRAL Monday that everything Trump wants states to do is either something North Carolina has already done — such as auditing results or cross-checking voters’immigration status — or that the elections board could do, such as a request to verify the immigration status of people working the polls.

“Our systems are very secure,” elections board spokesman Jason Tyson told WRAL Monday. “And they were secure under the prior standards. We’re doing so much already, and we will continue to make sure they’re secure.”

Trump has been unsuccessful in getting Congress to pass his preferred legislation for elections, called the SAVE Act, which in addition to other provisions would make people prove their citizenship to be allowed to continue voting. Critics say it could disenfranchise millions of people who have neither a passport nor their birth certificate, or who have a name that doesn’t match their birth certificate, such as married women.

The lawsuit says Trump is trying to force states to follow SAVE Act rules, even though Congress won’t pass them into law, by threatening to strip away grant funding. One requirement would be to run voters’ names through federal lists to ensure that non-citizen immigrants aren’t voting. The lawsuit, however, says previous tests have shown that process has a 7% error rate — meaning that millions of legitimate voters would likely be wrongfully flagged as being immigrants.

The lawsuit also notes that Trump has lost many other lawsuits related to his efforts to force through changes to election rules, arguing that the new DHS and FEMA grant rules should be considered part of that broader effort.

“While the president has repeatedly attempted to seize the power over elections from states and Congress, the courts have largely blocked his direct attempts at usurping power,” the lawsuit says. “The president now tries to accomplish the same goals by imposing conditions on [Homeland Security] grants.”