New Jersey joins lawsuit challenging Trump administration conditions on Title X funding
TRENTON, N.J. — New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport has joined a coalition of 23 states in a lawsuit seeking to block new federal conditions on Title X funding that the coalition argues are unlawful and could threaten access to family planning and preventive health services.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, challenges conditions on Title X funds, which support reproductive health care, family planning, cancer screenings and other preventive care for millions of low-income Americans nationwide.
The states are asking the court to block the conditions and protect access to Title X-funded health care.
“The most intimate, consequential, healthcare decisions of your life should not be dictated by politics, or by how much money you have in your wallet,” said Attorney General Davenport. “The Trump Administration is illegally intruding into the lives of New Jersey families in ways that will make healthcare even more expensive. We cannot accept that.”
Title X is the only federal grant program dedicated specifically to family planning and related preventive health services. For more than 50 years, the program has helped low-income patients access contraception, cancer screenings, sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment, pregnancy testing and counseling, and other preventive health care services.
In July, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a new funding notice for the next five-year grant cycle that, according to the lawsuit, requires applicants to align their programs with a new set of administration priorities as a condition of receiving or retaining federal funds.
According to the attorney general’s office, those priorities include discouraging the use of birth control and contraception; excluding and stigmatizing transgender people; requiring clinics to counsel patients toward marriage and parenthood rather than providing neutral, patient-centered guidance; and complying with unrelated political priorities.
Health care providers that do not comply with the conditions risk losing their funding, according to the attorney general’s office.
Davenport and the coalition argue that the new HHS conditions conflict with the statute and regulations governing Title X, which they say require providers to offer a broad range of contraceptive methods, provide patient-centered counseling and serve all patients, including LGBTQ+ individuals, in an inclusive and nondiscriminatory manner.
The coalition also alleges HHS imposed the conditions without the notice-and-comment process required under the Administrative Procedure Act and that the conditions are too vague for providers to reasonably determine what is required for compliance.
The states are asking the court to declare the new conditions unlawful, prevent HHS from enforcing them and preserve access to Title X funding under the program’s existing rules.
The lawsuit was led by the attorneys general of New York, Maryland and Massachusetts. Joining New Jersey are the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, along with the governors of Pennsylvania and Kentucky.
