California Gov. Gavin Newsom shot back at the Trump administration after a report that the White House was considering cutting the state’s federal funding.

“Californians pay the bills for the federal government,” Newsom posted on X Friday in a response to a CNN article that cited unidentified sources saying that Trump officials are preparing to withhold grants to the state.

A spokesperson for President Donald Trump said that no final decision on any potential actions by the White House has been made.

The state receives about $161.5 billion of funds from the federal government annually, according to California’s finance department. But Newsom says the state pays more to Washington than it gets.

“Maybe it’s time to cut that off,” the governor said, tagging Trump’s social media handle.

Trump has ratcheted up his attacks on the most populous U.S. state after disputes over immigration, transgender issues and allegations of antisemitism on college campuses. The president and the governor — whom Trump derides as “Gavin Newscum” — have traded personal barbs.

The president blamed Democrats in the state for the deadly Los Angeles wildfires in January and threatened to withhold federal disaster aid to southern California.

Trump’s attacks have forced Newsom, widely considered a potential presidential candidate in 2028, into a balancing act. The governor has sued to halt Trump’s tariffs and opposed the president’s policies on mass deportations and ending birthright citizenship. But Newsom also needs the president’s support for a $40 billion disaster aid package from Congress to help rebuild after the fires.

A potential pullback in federal dollars comes as California aims to close a $12 billion budget deficit. Newsom blamed the White House’s trade polices, which caused economists to scale back their projections for growth, for the decline in the state’s revenue. The governor branded the worrisome fiscal picture as a “Trump slump.”

Newsom proposed a spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year that counts on more than $170 billion of federal funds, making up more than a third of the state budget, according to a February report from the California Budget and Policy Center. The majority of those dollars are for health and human services expenses like the state’s Medicaid program. Other funds flow to kindergarten to grade 12 education, transportation and higher education.

The University of California system received $17.3 billion of federal dollars during the 2023-2024 fiscal year, for example. That includes funding for items like academic research, undergraduate financial aid and Medicare payments for its health system.

The higher education system, which includes schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA, has been a recent target of the administration. The leader of the US Justice Department’s antisemitism task force said the UC system should expect “massive lawsuits” over the way it handled protests against the war in Gaza.