(The Center Square) – The Washington State Attorney General’s Office staff has billed more than 34,000 hours working on lawsuits filed against the Trump Administration since November 2024, according to records obtained by The Center Square. More than two thirds of those hours billed within a six-month period.
The 34,000 hours represents a combined 1,416 days or 3.9 years of billable work.
“That’s a significant amount of time even for an agency with 800 lawyers,” Citizen Action Defense Fund Executive Director Jackson Maynard told The Center Square. “For comparison a lot of private law firms have billable requirements for lawyers in the range of 2000-2400 per year. That’s equivalent to 100 lawyers working full time on those cases.”
However, according to AGO Deputy Communications Director Mike Faulk, there are 30 attorneys handling the litigation.
There have been a total of 758 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration during his second term, according to Just Security’s legal tracker. Of those, 338 are waiting a court ruling. The plaintiffs have had 19 cases closed ultimately ruled in their favor, while 30 cases have closed in favor of the federal government.
The Center Square previously reported that the AGO billed 11,000 hours on Trump-related lawsuits in an eight-month period following the November 2024 election. A third of the 11,000 hours initially billed concerned a lawsuit against an executive order regarding federal funding for medical providers who perform gender-affirming procedures on children.
Newly obtained documents reveal that the AGO staff went on to bill more than 23,000 hours between July-October 2025.
While the records obtained showed $30,000 in costs and fees, the AGO says the total cost of the billed staff hours is difficult to calculate due to the different hourly rates depending on the job role and, if an attorney, their experience.
However, Faulk contended the spending was justified by Trump’s actions.
“The vast majority of the monetary expense of protecting Washingtonians from the illegal actions of the Trump administration is encompassed in the thousands of hours AGO staff have spent investigating and litigating these matters,” he wrote in an emailed statement.
The AGO’s total budget for the 2025-2027 biennium is $579 million.
Of the 23,000 hours billed, almost 3,000 of those hours concerned a lawsuit against an executive order regarding mental health funding cuts. More than 2,000 billed hours were focused on a lawsuit against a separate effort by Trump to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) bipartisan Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program.
More than 1,700 hours were billed working on a lawsuit against potential funding cut to states for teen reproductive and sexual health education known as the Personal Responsibility Education Program.
According to the WA AGO lawsuit tracker, AG Nick Brown has filed or joined 58 federal lawsuits against the current Trump administration, with Brown leading or co-leading 22 of them. The lawsuits concern $15 billion in disputed federal funding and policies.
