HHS terminates $67 million in teen pregnancy grants to Planned Parenthood, dozens of others over explicit content

The Department of Health and Human Services has pulled the plug on 53 federally funded teen pregnancy prevention grants, totaling $67 million, after a review found that curricula pushed on adolescents contained material the agency called "overly sexually explicit or pornographic." Planned Parenthood affiliates in California and the Heartland region are among the more than 50 organizations that received termination letters, Breitbart News reported.

The grants were awarded during the Biden administration through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which is administered by the Office of Population Affairs under HHS's Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health. Of 67 Biden-era TPP grants, 53 are now being terminated. HHS says the content funded by those grants violated the very statute that created the program.

In place of the canceled awards, HHS announced two new grant opportunities. The replacement funding will emphasize what the agency describes as "body literacy" and will explicitly bar programs that promote abortion, gender ideology, or sexually explicit material aimed at minors.

What the termination letters say

The Daily Signal first obtained the termination letter sent by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health. The letter states:

"After a review of all curricular content, OASH believes that some curricula normalize adolescent sexual activity and are not age appropriate, as they contain overly sexually explicit or pornographic content that is not necessary to achieve the TPP program's statutory mission."

The letter continued that OASH "is adjusting its discretionary Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program award portfolio, which includes the decision not to renew some of its TPP Program awards in order to better prioritize agency resources."

That is bureaucratic language for a sweeping housecleaning. Nearly four out of every five Biden-era TPP grants are gone.

What taxpayers were funding

The specific curricula that triggered the review paint a picture that most parents would find difficult to defend. Planned Parenthood California Central Coast used the Love Notes curriculum, aimed at teens ages 14 to 19. That curriculum reportedly included content describing various forms of pornography and featured a celebrity interview discussing exposure to abusive pornography beginning at age 11, with escalation to graphic, violent content by age 14.

The Maryland Department of Health, another grant recipient, used a curriculum that included a role-play scenario with two boys weighing whether to use condoms to avoid contracting HIV. The Daily Signal's Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell reported that the Maryland department "did not respond to the Daily Signal's request for comment by time of publication." Planned Parenthood California Central Coast likewise did not reply.

The silence from grantees is notable. When organizations collecting millions in federal dollars cannot explain or defend their own curricula, taxpayers are entitled to draw conclusions.

A problem far beyond one program

The TPP grant terminations are part of a broader federal effort to scrub age-inappropriate material from taxpayer-funded programs. Acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison told Newsmax that a national review of federally funded sex education programs found inappropriate gender-based content in nearly 40 states. HHS separately terminated California's Personal Responsibility Education Program grant after the state refused to remove gender ideology content from its curriculum.

"None of that is appropriate. None of that is common sense. And this anti-science material will no longer be funded by federal taxpayers."

That was Gradison's assessment. California's PREP curriculum reportedly included materials teaching boys as young as 10 that they could become girls and promoting gender transition hormones or surgeries, content that has nothing to do with preventing teen pregnancy and everything to do with ideological capture of public health programs.

The new funding model

HHS stated that the two replacement grant opportunities will "focus on programs that do not promote material that depicts, describes, exposes, or presents obscene, indecent, or sexually explicit content, including content that normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors." Just The News reported that the new funding totals roughly $8.3 million, a fraction of the $67 million terminated. The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health put it plainly: "Federal funds may not be used to indoctrinate America's children with radical ideologies or other inappropriate material."

The gap between $67 million and $8.3 million will draw criticism. But the question worth asking is whether the old money was producing results in the first place.

A track record of failure

Evidence suggests it was not. A 2017 Office of Adolescent Health report found that of 38 TPP programs studied, only three showed long-term reductions in unprotected sex. Just one showed a long-term reduction in overall teen sexual activity. A 2018 Mathematica analysis was equally damning: only 5 of 40 programs reduced teen sexual activity, and only 4 of 40 lowered teen pregnancy rates. The vast majority showed no measurable impact, as National Review documented.

So taxpayers were spending tens of millions of dollars on programs that largely failed at their stated mission, and that, in the process, exposed minors to sexually explicit content the authorizing statute never contemplated. That is not a funding cut. That is an overdue correction.

The list of organizations receiving termination letters stretches across the country: the Wisconsin Department of Health, the Baltimore City Health Department, the Oklahoma City-County Health Department, the Public Health Authority of Cabarrus County in North Carolina, and Hennepin County in Minnesota, among others. The geographic spread shows how deeply embedded these programs became during the Biden years, and how little oversight accompanied the money.

Legal pushback already underway

The administration's effort has not gone unchallenged. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell blocked HHS from enforcing a July policy document that required TPP grant recipients to comply with executive orders targeting gender ideology and what the administration called "radical indoctrination." The ruling, prompted by a lawsuit from three Planned Parenthood affiliates, applied broadly to all grant recipients, nonprofits, city and county health departments, Native American tribes, and universities. Judge Howell stated the policy change was "motivated solely by political concerns, devoid of any considered process or analysis, and ignorant of the statutory emphasis on evidence-based programming," the Associated Press reported.

HHS pushed back, saying its guidance "ensures that taxpayer dollars no longer support content that undermines parental rights, promotes radical gender ideology, or exposes children to sexually explicit material under the banner of public health."

This is not the first time courts have intervened on TPP funding. During the first Trump term, five separate rulings blocked the administration's initial attempts to defund the program and redirect money toward abstinence-emphasizing alternatives. The legal pattern is familiar: the executive branch acts, progressive organizations sue, and a federal judge finds a procedural or substantive reason to freeze the action. Whether the latest round of terminations survives judicial review remains an open question.

The broader funding fight

The TPP battle fits into a wider struggle over how federal dollars flow, and to whom. Across the government, the administration has moved to redirect funding away from programs it considers ideologically compromised, a pattern visible in everything from recent fights over DHS funding priorities to the reshaping of public health grants.

Fourteen of the 67 Biden-era TPP grants survived the review. HHS has not publicly explained which programs were retained or why, leaving a gap in the public record. Nor has the agency disclosed whether the termination letters were identical across all 53 grantees or tailored to each organization's specific curriculum. Those details matter, both for transparency and for the inevitable legal challenges ahead.

What is clear is the scale. More than 50 organizations that grew accustomed to federal checks are now cut off. The programs they ran reached adolescents in at least eight states. And the content those programs delivered, role-play scenarios about condom use between minors, discussions of pornography with 14-year-olds, materials that had nothing to do with pregnancy prevention, was paid for by people who never consented to it.

The real question

Defenders of these programs will frame the terminations as an attack on public health. They will argue that evidence-based sex education reduces teen pregnancy and that the administration is substituting ideology for science. That argument might carry more weight if the government's own research hadn't shown the programs failing by their own metrics, and if the curricula in question had stayed within the boundaries of their statutory purpose.

A program created to prevent teen pregnancy does not need to walk 14-year-olds through a celebrity's escalating exposure to violent pornography. It does not need to stage role-play exercises about condom negotiation between minors. And it certainly does not need to teach 10-year-old boys about gender transition surgery. When a program strays that far from its mission, the question is not whether to defund it. The question is how it got funded in the first place.

Sixty-seven million dollars is a lot of money to spend on programs that mostly didn't work and partly shouldn't have existed. The parents whose children sat through those curricula deserved better. So did the taxpayers who paid for them.