fb tracking

Healthy Futures of Texas v. Department of Health and Human Services

Congress created the TPPP in 2010 to fund a wide range of evidence-based programs to prevent teen pregnancy. Healthy Futures of Texas is among the recipients of 81 five-year grants awarded by HHS in 2015 that were designed to continue through June 2020.

In May 2017, HHS announced its intention to terminate the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program in the next fiscal year. HHS then informed all TPPP grantees that their grants would be terminated effective June 2018, two years early. Nonetheless, Congress has continue to fund the program.

In February and March 2018, Public Citizen and several other organizations filed four suits on behalf of 10 grantees in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Washington state, seeking to set aside the unlawful termination of their grants. Despite three of those courts holding HHS’s termination unlawful (and the fourth not yet deciding the issue), HHS did not indicate that it would reinstate the five-year project periods for the remaining 62 grant recipients. Instead, it indicated that it intended to use the funding for new grants with a different focus.

Healthy Futures of Texas, a grant recipient represented by Public Citizen Litigation Group, filed the class-action lawsuit to preserve grants awarded to it and the remaining 61 recipients. In the class-action suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Healthy Futures of Texas asks the court to find that HHS’s termination of the TPPP grants was unlawful and to order HHS to reinstate the grants for the awarded five-year grant period.

On May 25, 2018, the district court granted class certification and appointed attorneys from Public Citizen as class counsel. On June 1, 2018, the district court granted summary judgment in favor of the class and held that the termination of the grants of all 62 recipients was unlawful.