Trump administration beats lawsuit over grants for family planning

(Legal Newsline) – A group challenging Trump administration policy that prefers giving grants to health-care providers who don’t support gender ideology has lost its lawsuit.

Pennsylvania federal judge Jennifer Wilson said Sept. 17 that plaintiffs National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association and Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania lacked standing to sue over new funding criteria. The groups filed suit earlier this year after reviewing the 2027 Notice of Funding Opportunity.

It showed that when deciding where to dole out federal dollars, HHS and other agencies will now consider whether those submitting grant proposals are meeting three sets of priorities. They include ending DEI practices and ending support for gender ideology.

“Plaintiffs seem to allege several harms in their complaint,” Wilson wrote. “But in their briefs, Plaintiffs interpret the alleged harm as ‘a competitive disadvantage in the process for obtaining a benefit—rather than the denial of or inability to obtain the benefit itself.’”

Thus, they couldn’t show harm as a result of the change, only “uncertainty over how to best apply for a federal grant,” Wilson wrote.

In their complaint, the plaintiffs said HHS and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were hijacking the Title X grant application program to further their political agenda, disregarding a mandate from Congress to offer a broad range of family-planning methods.

Before the suit, HHS announced it canceled 53 of 67 grants for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. A new alignment review for applications skews the traditional criteria of how many patients would be served, the extent to which family-planning services are needed and the ability to make effective use of the grant money, the suit said.

NFPRHA is a nonprofit member association supporting the work of family-planning providers. Attorneys from Pennsylvania’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit.

“In any grant competition, the criteria for selecting awardees are going to favor some applicants and disfavor others,” Wilson wrote. “That is the point of a competitive process—to identify the applicants best suited for the grant.”

This report was produced by Legal Newsline and distributed by The Center Square as part of a content-sharing agreement. Reach editor John O’Brien at john.obrien@therecordinc.com.

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This story originally appeared on thecentersquare.com.