Fed up with lawfare from the Left, the Trump administration is taking steps to limit the taxpayer-funded partisan activity of the American Bar Association (ABA). The ABA uses grants from the federal government to promote leftist causes. Although the 150,000-member organization is voluntary, it provides biased draft rules and policies for state bars, which those bars usually adopt and impose on attorneys required to be members to practice law.
In March, Reuters reported that White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Harrison Fields said in an email regarding the crackdown, “President Trump represents the people, not a board of snooty, leftist lawyers.”
On Trump’s first day in office, he issued Executive Order 14169, which froze tens of millions of dollars in USAID and State Department funding to the ABA. Some of the five grants it was about to receive totaled $3.2 million, awarded to the ABA Commission on Domestic and Sexual Violence for training attorneys representing victims of gender-based and LGBTQ violence.
The ABA sued, claiming it forced the organization to lay off 300 employees, a third of its workforce. U.S. District Court Judge Christopher Cooper of the District of Columbia, an Obama appointee, sided with the ABA, ruling that the cuts violated the ABA’s First Amendment rights, as they were allegedly made in retaliation. The Trump administration is appealing.
However, the ABA was already in financial straits. In 2017, the ABA was operating under a $7.7 million deficit and laid off a substantial number of employees. Revenue dropped from $149 million in 2018 to $127.2 million in 2019.
The ABA also sued the Trump administration over tens of millions of dollars in USAID cuts that affected its overseas work training lawyers and judges in other countries. The administration froze foreign assistance funding that affected the ABA and other organizations. U.S. District Court Judge Amir Ali, who was also appointed to the bench by Obama, struck down the cuts, prompting calls to impeach him.
Furthermore, on February 14, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson banned political appointees from holding ABA leadership roles, attending events, or renewing memberships, citing the ABA’s “leftist advocacy.”
He said in a letter to FTC staff, “The President of the ABA recently issued a statement accusing the Trump-Vance Administration of ‘wide-scale affronts to the rule of law.’ What followed was a breathless screed leveled against President Donald J. Trump’s swift and tireless delivery on his promises to the American people to confront our existential immigration crisis and end waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government. This statement was not a sober assessment of the law. It was a collection of Democrat political talking points with the ABA’s logo affixed at the top.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi accused the ABA of “unlawful race and sex discrimination” due to its DEI programs in a February 28 letter posted on X by the DOJ’s Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle. The administration also pushed for investigations into the ABA’s diversity programs.
Bondi cited Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In its role as the sole accreditor of U.S. law schools, the ABA has imposed diversity mandates and curriculum requirements on law schools. In 2022, the ABA required law schools to teach that students have a duty to “work to eliminate racism” to maintain accreditation.
Requiring law schools to use affirmative action also violates some state laws. Arizona banned affirmative action and quotas in state colleges and universities in 2010.
The ABA responded by suspending its DEI programs until further review in August.
In early April, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a memo prohibiting DOJ lawyers from attending or speaking at ABA events, or holding office or membership in the organization, with limited exceptions. The memo cited the ABA’s “activist causes” and pointed out that, despite receiving government funding through grants, the ABA had turned around and sued the administration.
On April 24, Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to assess whether to revoke the ABA’s status as the federally recognized accreditor of law schools (recognized by the Department of Education), citing the ABA’s DEI requirements. It referenced the ABA’s temporary pausing of the requirements: “Though the Council subsequently suspended its enforcement while it considers proposed revisions, this standard and similar unlawful mandates must be permanently eradicated.”
A few days ago, Bondi sent a letter to the ABA telling the organization that the DOJ will no longer comply with its ratings process for judicial nominees, removing its “special treatment,” such as “notice of nominees before a nomination was announced to the public.” She said that “the ABA no longer functions as a fair arbiter of nominees’ qualifications, and its ratings invariably and demonstrably favor nominees put forth by Democratic administrations. The ABA’s steadfast refusal to fix the bias in its ratings process, despite criticism from Congress, the Administration, and the academy, is disquieting.”
As a result, “the Office of Legal Policy will no longer direct nominees to provide waivers allowing the ABA access to nonpublic information, including bar records,” Bondi said.
“Nominees will also not respond to questionnaires prepared by the ABA and will not sit for interviews with the ABA,” she added.
Studies reveal that nominees from Democratic presidents generally receive higher ABA ratings than those from Republican presidents
The letter was issued after several Republican senators from the Senate Committee on the Judiciary wrote to the ABA in a letter earlier this year, stating that they planned to disregard its rating system. Trump’s previous administration and the George W. Bush administration also excluded the ABA from its exclusive early look at nominees.
The ABA has also come under fire for its vague and broad ethics rules, which are used to target conservative attorneys and subsequently adopted by mandatory state bars. For example, Model Rule of Professional Conduct Rule 8.4(d), which most states have adopted, provides, “It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct that is prejudicial to the administration of justice.”
Another rule commonly used prohibits “discrimination” in a wide range of categories. Rule 8.4(g) states that it is professional misconduct for a lawyer to “engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.” Notes after the rule indicate that this includes referring to someone as “dear” or “honey,” which critics contend violates attorneys’ First Amendment rights.
In 1979, approximately half of all attorneys in the United States were members of the ABA. That number has shrunk to 14 percent. Nearly 73 percent of all of the ABA’s revenue comes from membership dues, meeting fees, and accreditation fees from law schools.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
