The Department of Health and Human Services has pulled the plug on 53 teen pregnancy prevention grants, worth a combined $67 million, after a curriculum review found material the agency called "overly sexually explicit or pornographic" and unsuitable for minors. Planned Parenthood affiliates and state health departments from Maryland to Minnesota were among the more than 50 organizations that received termination letters.
The move wipes out nearly 80 percent of the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants awarded under the Biden administration and replaces them with two new funding opportunities that explicitly bar content promoting sexual activity for minors. It marks one of the sharpest federal funding actions yet in the ongoing fight over what children should be taught about sex with taxpayer dollars.
The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health, which oversees the Office of Population Affairs and administers the TPP Program, conducted a review of all curricular content used by grantees. The conclusion, laid out in termination letters sent to organizations late last month, was blunt.
"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 letters went on to state that OASH would adjust its "discretionary Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program award portfolio," including "the decision not to renew some of its TPP Program awards in order to better prioritize agency resources." The agency cited the statute that created the program as the standard the curricula failed to meet, though the specific statutory citation was not included in the letters as reported.
Breitbart News reported on the terminations, drawing on original reporting by The Daily Signal's Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, who first obtained the termination letters and detailed the specific curricula at issue.
The list of organizations that lost funding stretches across the country: Planned Parenthood California Central Coast, Planned Parenthood of The Heartland Inc., the Wisconsin Department of Health, the Maryland 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.
Some of the curriculum details that surfaced paint a clear picture of why HHS acted. The Maryland Department of Health, for example, used a curriculum that included a role-play scenario featuring two boys deciding whether to use condoms to avoid contracting HIV. The department did not respond to The Daily Signal's request for comment.
Planned Parenthood California Central Coast used the Love Notes curriculum, aimed at teens ages 14 to 19. That organization also reportedly did not reply to a request for comment. The ongoing battle over Planned Parenthood's access to federal money has been a defining feature of the current Congress, and these grant terminations add another front to that fight.
Of the 67 TPP grants awarded under the Biden administration, 53 were terminated. HHS has not publicly explained why the remaining 14 grants survived the review, and the specific content that distinguished them from the terminated programs remains unclear.
HHS did not simply cut the money and walk away. The agency announced two new grant opportunities designed to replace the terminated awards, but with a fundamentally different set of ground rules. The new grants will promote "body literacy" rather than what HHS characterized as "gender ideology," abortion, and birth control.
The agency stated that the new funding 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." The specific eligibility requirements, funding amounts, and application timelines for the new grants have not yet been detailed publicly.
The shift in language is deliberate. "Body literacy" signals a move toward biological education stripped of the ideological layering that critics say has crept into federally funded sex education over the past several years. Whether the new grants attract the same volume of applicants, or the same types of organizations, remains an open question.
The TPP grant terminations did not happen in a vacuum. The Trump administration has been systematically reviewing federally funded education programs for content it considers inappropriate, and the results have been consistent: cut the money when the content crosses the line.
In a parallel action, HHS terminated California's Personal Responsibility Education Program grant, worth up to $12.3 million, after the state refused to remove gender identity content from its curriculum. Fox News reported that California's Department of Public Health explicitly defied a 60-day deadline to modify its materials, which included middle school lessons on transgenderism, nonbinary identity, hormone therapy, and surgical body modifications.
Acting Assistant Secretary Andrew Gradison, who oversees the Administration for Children and Families, did not hold back about the California decision: "California's refusal to comply with federal law and remove egregious gender ideology from federally funded sex-ed materials is unacceptable. The Trump Administration will not allow taxpayer dollars to be used to indoctrinate children."
The problem, Gradison indicated, extends far beyond one state. A national review found inappropriate gender-based content in schools across nearly 40 states. As Newsmax reported, Gradison said California's curriculum allegedly taught boys as young as 10 that they could become girls and promoted gender transition hormones or surgeries.
"None of that is appropriate. None of that is common sense. And this anti-science material will no longer be funded by federal taxpayers."
Gradison also noted that "California selected materials that are outside of the bounds of this program, that have nothing to do with teaching the importance of abstinence or contraception." The same logic, that grantees strayed from the statutory purpose of the programs funding them, runs through the TPP terminations as well.
What stands out in both the TPP terminations and the California PREP cut is how little resistance the affected organizations mounted publicly. The Maryland Department of Health did not respond to press inquiries. Planned Parenthood California Central Coast did not respond. The silence is notable from organizations that typically have no shortage of public statements when their funding is at stake.
The broader question is how this content made it into federally funded curricula in the first place. The Biden administration awarded 67 TPP grants. The Trump administration's review found that 53 of them, a staggering majority, contained material HHS now considers in violation of the program's own statutory mission. That is not a handful of outliers. That is a systemic failure of oversight by the prior administration.
This pattern of cleaning up after Biden-era policy failures has become a recurring theme. The DOJ's recent charges against illegal immigrants in a child-smuggling ring tied to a Biden-era program reflect the same dynamic: programs launched with lofty intentions and minimal guardrails, left for the next administration to untangle.
Meanwhile, the legislative machinery that could permanently reshape federal funding for organizations like Planned Parenthood continues to grind forward on Capitol Hill. The Senate's reconciliation battles have already shown how difficult it is to lock in spending reforms through the budget process, and every executive action taken now could be reversed by a future administration willing to look the other way again.
Several important questions remain. The specific statute HHS cited as the basis for the terminations has not been publicly identified by name or section number in the reporting so far. The 14 surviving grants have not been explained. The detailed terms of the two replacement grant opportunities have not been released. And none of the major grantees, including two Planned Parenthood affiliates, have offered a public defense of the curricula that cost them their funding.
That last point matters. If the content was defensible, organizations with Planned Parenthood's resources and media infrastructure would presumably say so. Their silence suggests they know what a public airing of the material would look like to the parents and taxpayers who funded it.
When 53 out of 67 grants fail a basic content review, the problem was never a few bad apples. It was the orchard.