By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown marked National Military Appreciation Month this week by invoking the values he says defined his 30 years in the U.S. Army. “Service in uniform demands sacrifice, discipline, and a commitment to something larger than yourself,” Brown wrote on social media.
It’s a compelling statement. It’s also worth examining against the record of the office he runs.
Since January 20, 2025, Brown has led, co-led, or joined more than 160 legal actions against the federal government — over 60 lawsuits and dozens of amicus briefs — making him one of the most litigious attorneys general in the country against the current administration. His office’s Federal Accountability Unit, which he announced the day after Donald Trump’s election in November 2024, carries an annual budget of $1.2 million and was built specifically to oppose the incoming administration before it had taken a single official action.
That unit did not exist during the Biden years. It was not needed, because Brown never once challenged the Biden administration in court during his first two years in office.
Not once.
The numbers behind the posture
Brown’s own office confirmed in a January 2026 year-end summary that the Federal Accountability Unit “led or joined more than 50 lawsuits” in its first year alone, alongside dozens of additional briefs and coalition letters. By March 2026, Fox Baltimore and WCBM had documented the total crossing 100 actions at the 14-month mark. The press releases keep coming: tariffs, ICE detention facilities, voting rules, environmental regulations, gender-affirming care, student loans, SNAP benefits, federal employee terminations, wind energy permits. The list runs longer than most people’s grocery receipts.
Brown calls it protecting Marylanders. His critics — including Republican members of the General Assembly watching the state navigate a $1.4 billion budget deficit — call it something else.
“I’d say we’re seeing some of the greatest theatre that I’ve experienced in politics,” said Del. Lauren Arikan. Del. Jason Buckel, the House Minority Leader, put it more bluntly when Brown sought additional funding for the unit earlier this year: “It’s hard to juxtapose those realities” — meaning the cost of litigation infrastructure against cuts being made to developmental disability services and health care programs.
A mirror, not a principle
Brown is not doing anything that attorneys general of the opposing party haven’t done before. That’s important context — and it’s also the most damning context.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed 100 lawsuits against the Biden administration. Greg Abbott, before him, used to say he went to the office, sued the federal government, and went home. Republican attorneys general filed 133 multistate lawsuits against Biden over four years. Democratic attorneys general filed 138 lawsuits against Trump’s first term. The numbers are nearly identical, just with the party labels swapped.
What this symmetry proves is not that Brown is right and his critics are wrong, or vice versa. What it proves is that this behavior has nothing to do with principle and everything to do with which party holds the White House. It is a partisan reflex dressed in constitutional language — and everyone in the legal community who studies it knows it.
“Through their partisan-motivated lawsuits against the federal government, state attorneys general are attempting to increase their role in federal constitutional interpretation and federal policymaking,” wrote Mark Miller, a government professor at Clark University, in a law review article on the phenomenon. “The danger is that these partisan-motivated lawsuits… are increasing the perception that American judges are merely partisan actors in black robes.”
Brown, to his credit, has won a significant number of these cases — his office claims court victories have preserved more than $150 million in federal funding for Maryland. But Texas AG Paxton won more than three out of every four lawsuits he filed against Biden, too. Winning doesn’t make it principled. It makes it effective. Those are different things.
The Biden years: A study in silence
The fairest test of whether an attorney general is acting on principle or on partisanship is simple: did he challenge his own party’s administration when he disagreed with it?
For Brown, the answer is documented and unambiguous. During 2023 and 2024, as Brown served his first two years as Maryland’s attorney general, he filed zero adversarial actions against the Biden administration. He did not challenge the FDA’s overregulation of mifepristone — twelve other Democratic attorneys general did, suing the Biden administration to expand access to abortion medication. He did not challenge the U.S. Postal Service’s decision to purchase primarily gas-powered vehicles — Washington state’s AG did. He did not identify a single Biden policy that warranted legal challenge on behalf of Marylanders.
What Brown did do was serve as a pledged delegate to the 2024 Democratic National Convention for Kamala Harris. He joined coalitions defending Biden administration policies when they were challenged by Republican states. He praised Biden’s regulatory agenda. His office during those years functioned as a legal ally of the federal government, not a watchdog of it.
The Federal Accountability Unit didn’t exist because there was nothing, apparently, to be accountable for — right up until the moment the other party won an election.
What “something larger than yourself” actually means
Brown’s Military Appreciation Month post deserves to be taken seriously, because the values he invoked are real ones. Military culture doesn’t just teach sacrifice — it teaches institutional loyalty, apolitical professionalism, and the understanding that your personal views don’t excuse you from your obligations to the institution you serve. Officers don’t get to pick which orders to follow based on which party issued them.
The attorney general of Maryland is not a military officer, and the analogy has limits. But Brown chose to invoke that framework — and by that framework, the question worth asking is whether his office has functioned as the chief legal officer of all Maryland taxpayers, or as a well-funded arm of the Democratic Attorneys General Association, coordinating Tuesday morning strategy calls with 22 other Democratic AGs before an opposing-party president had signed a single executive order.
The budget increase at the OAG — nearly 37 percent over two years, from $66 million in FY2025 to $90 million in FY2026, with 31 new positions — happened alongside cuts to services for Marylanders with developmental disabilities. The Federal Accountability Unit’s $1.2 million annual cost is partly offset by fellowship funding from NYU’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, an outside progressive advocacy organization that is, in effect, subsidizing the salaries of attorneys working inside a Maryland state office.
Sacrifice. Discipline. Commitment to something larger than yourself.
The question isn’t whether Brown served honorably in uniform. By all accounts, he did. The question is whether the office he runs today reflects those values — or reflects something considerably smaller: the interests of one party, funded by everyone else.
Sources: the Maryland Office of the Attorney General press release archive, Maryland General Assembly budget documents, Ballotpedia’s multistate litigation tracker, Straight Arrow News, Maryland Matters, The Daily Record, and the Baltimore Banner.
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