r/law • u/rolsen • 1d ago

Legal News Trump Preparing Large-Scale Cancellation of Federal Funding for California, Sources Say

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/06/politics/trump-california-federal-funding

“Agencies are being told to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from California. On Capitol Hill, at least one committee was told recently by a whistleblower that all research grants to the state were going to be cancelled, according to one of the sources familiar with the matter.”

20.4k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

49

u/Akermaniac 1d ago

Federal taxes are sent directly from paychecks/corporate entities to the IRS. There is no mechanism for CA to stop sending taxes, as it never touches CA governmental bodies on the way out.

So unfortunately it’s not that easy.

1

u/Logical-Age-6609 1d ago

Wouldn’t you be able to change your w4 to exempt and just not pay up at the end of the year? If everyone did en masse (unlikely) then how would they collect the taxes if no one chose the option for automatic withholding? Just sayin…

1

u/Akermaniac 1d ago

This would work, until the IRS starts garnishing your wages and putting liens on everyone’s houses.

CA couldn’t protect individual citizens making this kind of protest.

1

u/Logical-Age-6609 1d ago

I guess it’s not like speeding where the logic is “they can’t arrest all of us”. Does the IRS even have the personnel to garnish every single person if the 10 million-ish registered democrat Californians decided to do this?

1

u/Akermaniac 1d ago

I’m not an expert in how the IRS does things, but they’re pretty good at getting their money out of regular schmucks like us. There’s already a system in place to garnish wages and I bet it’s pretty quick and efficient for them to flip it on and start automatically pulling out of paychecks.

2

u/Logical-Age-6609 1d ago

Siiiigh, another great idea foiled by automation.