Trump administration cuts teen pregnancy prevention grants nationwide

Federal health officials canceled 53 of 67 Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grants, stripping about $68 million from universities, community groups, city and state health departments and Planned Parenthood affiliates in more than two dozen states. The termination letters went out June 26, two years before the awards were scheduled to end.

In Philadelphia, AccessMatters said its $1.2 million grant was terminated effective the same day it received the notice. HHS listed that award as a 2023-2028 replication grant for Philadelphia with an average anticipated 1,655 youth served each year, part of a national program built to deliver medically accurate, age-appropriate prevention services. The sudden cutoff hit a provider that has worked in low-income neighborhoods and with teens who need sexual health education, testing, and counseling.

HHS puts the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program’s annual budget at about $101 million and says that in 2023-24 its grantees reached 54,098 youth, with 82.3% of participants served in schools. Current and past recipients have scaled evidence-based curricula, tested new approaches, and extended services to communities with the greatest need, including homeless youth, parenting teens and young people in juvenile detention and foster care.

Congress appropriated $101 million for fiscal year 2026, and in a July 2 letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Sen. Patty Murray and other Democrats said the administration was ignoring congressional intent. They pointed to CDC-backed data showing the teen birth rate fell 7% in 2025 to another historic low, arguing that the federal government was retreating from a program that has helped drive that decline.

The move revived an earlier Trump-era fight over the same grants. In 2017 and 2018, HHS political appointees overruled career experts in an effort to cut teen pregnancy prevention funding, and a federal judge later permanently blocked those cuts as arbitrary and capricious. This time, HHS terminated the awards because they no longer aligned with its current priorities, even as the agency continued posting new Teen Pregnancy Prevention funding opportunities.