By Office of Maryland Attorney General
Attorney General Anthony G. Brown has joined a coalition of 16 states and the District of Columbia suing the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over an effort to deny support to young people for purely political reasons. The Trump administration is threatening to pull funding for longstanding teen sexual health education programs from states unless they remove language affirming young people’s gender identity.
Maryland was awarded more than $2.6 million across five years through the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) grant and uses the funding to educate teenagers on healthy sexual behaviors to reduce pregnancy and prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections. Other states joining this lawsuit also receive vital PREP funding, as well as funding through the Title V Sexual Risk Avoidance Education program, which is similarly focused on sexual health education.
“The Trump administration is playing politics with the health and safety of young Marylanders, threatening to gut sexual health education programs that prevent teen pregnancy and HIV,” said Attorney General Brown. “If the federal government follows through on its threat to pull nearly $950,000 in State funding, it will destroy 15 years of successful programming that helps more than 1,400 Maryland youth every year. These programs are a matter of life and death for communities like Prince George’s County, which the previous Trump administration recognized as having one of the highest numbers of new HIV diagnoses in the country.”
Many states require materials for these programs to have inclusive language that speaks to all young people regardless of their sex or gender identity. This practice, based on medical evidence and a commitment to the well-being of all students, is what the Trump administration calls “radical gender ideology.”
The complaint, which seeks to halt HHS before they carry out further terminations, was filed in the federal District Court of Oregon.
The lawsuit alleges that HHS’s actions violate the federal Administrative Procedure Act as well as the United States Constitution. Congress created the grant programs with clear statutory requirements that are at direct odds with the Trump administration’s baseless insistence that gender is absolute, fixed and binary, and that any reference to transgender status or gender identity must be erased altogether.
The states who are part of the lawsuit say that forcing them to use medically unsupported, incomplete PREP program content conflicts with those statutory requirements and is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act. They also allege that HHS’s unilateral actions usurp Congress’ spending power and violates the separation of powers.
In filing the lawsuits, Attorney General Brown is joined by the attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin.
The AFRO editorial team updated this article.