NJ joins fight over federal family-planning funds
States say HHS is unlawfully tying Title X grants to unrelated political and ideological priorities.
New Jersey’s attorney general has joined a coalition of 22 other states suing the Trump administration over new conditions they say threaten federal family-planning funding for states and medical providers.
The four-count, 63-page lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland, accuses the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services of attaching ideological strings to Title X funding that gives low-income or uninsured people access to family planning services.
Among the conditions states found particularly objectionable were demands to end diversity, equity and inclusion policies; end support for “gender ideology” and “sex-rejecting procedures” for children; and end “overmedicalization,” a term the lawsuit says includes hormonal contraception.
The states also objected to demands that providers “enforce” the Hyde Amendment and safeguard “life-affirming” program delivery; employ counseling methods that push patients toward parenthood and marriage; and advance other unrelated priorities such as “ending crime and disorder on America’s streets.”
These conditions, laid out last month in an HHS funding notice, will penalize states and providers that “refuse to abandon nondiscrimination initiatives or conform to the administration’s anti-science and ideological version of family planning,” according to a press release from New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport.
Those that don’t comply risk losing their funding altogether.
That will jeopardize preventive care for millions of low-income Americans who rely on the 56-year-old program for contraception, cancer screenings, pregnancy tests and other health care services,
New Jersey received more than $8 million in Title X family-planning funding in fiscal year 2026, according to the lawsuit.
“The most intimate, consequential, health care decisions of your life should not be dictated by politics, or by how much money you have in your wallet,” Davenport said in a statement. “The Trump administration is illegally intruding into the lives of New Jersey families in ways that will make health care even more expensive. We cannot accept that.”
Davenport and the coalition argue that the new conditions conflict with the law governing Title X, which requires 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 states also said HHS unlawfully created the conditions without the notice-and-comment process required by the Administrative Procedure Act and that the conditions are too vague.
The lawsuit names as defendants Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, the agency itself and other federal administrators.
A spokesperson for Health and Human Services did not respond to a Thursday request for comment.
The coalition has asked a federal court to declare the conditions unlawful, block HHS from enforcing them and preserve Title X access by using the program’s existing rules.
The attorneys general of New York, Maryland and Massachusetts are leading the suit. They have been joined by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.
The governors of Pennsylvania and Kentucky have also signed on.
Steve Janoski is an award-winning investigative journalist with nearly two decades of experience covering criminal justice, policing, courts, government, and politics. His reporting has exposed corruption, government malfeasance, and police misconduct. His work has appeared in the New York Post, USA Today, The Associated Press, The Record, and the Asbury Park Press. At The Jersey Vindicator, he covers criminal justice. Reach Steve at steve AT jerseyvindicator.org.