Updated September 25, 2026 at 9:11 AM MDT
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Congress passed $101 million in funding for teen pregnancy prevention, and President Trump signed that into law as part of his budget bill. But with less than a week to go in the 2026 fiscal year, about $100 million of that funding remains unspent.
What gives?
According to a letter from members of Congress shared exclusively with NPR, the Department of Health and Human Services has spent about $500,000 of the $101 million it is obligated to give out in grants to organizations that work with teens.
"Withholding these funds deprives teens across the U.S. of vital resources and threatens to unwind decades of progress made in reducing teen pregnancy," reads the letter from the Democratic Women's Caucus to HHS. Ninety-two lawmakers in the House and Senate signed the letter, which was sent to HHS on Friday morning.
Grants to dozens of nonprofits, universities and health departments were cut off abruptly in June. Most were in the third year of a five-year funding cycle, according to the lawmakers' letter.
Stephanie McDowell is the executive director of Bridgercare, a nonprofit in Bozeman, Mont. It's one of about 50 organizations that had their grants terminated. "We truly had no indication that our funding would be cut," she says.
This recent loss of federal funding has been challenging, McDowell says. She's been trying to find other grants to apply to, but it's not easy. "Ultimately, we can't sustain an education program at the scale that we were at, serving 21 counties across the state of Montana without funding," she says. "And so we will have to lay off staff, and there will be youth that go without sex ed."
But it is possible that the federal grant funding will come back. HHS could decide to reinstate the grants by itself, or a lawsuit in federal court challenging the terminations might force the agency to do so.
The power of the purse
Congress established the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program in 2010. It's long been a target of the Trump administration and some conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation. President Trump's 2027 budget request calls for eliminating it, labeling it leftist and ineffective, and he tried to cut all these grants in his first term.
But Trump also signed a budget bill into law in February that specifically allocated $101 million to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program.
"HHS is obligated to spend this money as directed by Congress," says Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., who is the lead author on the letter sent to HHS on Friday. "This is a bipartisan program created by Congress with the clear intent of supporting evidence-based education models that help reduce teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and other health risks for young people."
She says that the Trump administration appeared to be trying to put those funds toward promoting abstinence. Soon after the agency canceled the grants in June, it issued a new funding opportunity for teen pregnancy prevention, which promoted abstinence-only sex ed. "This does not fulfill what Congress had appropriated and what its guidelines were," she says.
In August, Judge Christopher Cooper of the D.C. federal District Court ruled that HHS can't use those new requirements. "The TPP Program now mandates an abstinence-only approach to pregnancy prevention, promotes the nebulous concept of 'body literacy,' and prohibits the 'normalization' of sexual activity among minors. That new policy is likely arbitrary and capricious," he wrote.
The judge also flagged that the funding notice HHS sent out included citations for research papers that do not exist. The law allocating the funds specifically says programs must be evidence-based. Cooper's decision on whether to reinstate the terminated grants is expected soon.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to NPR's request for comment about the grants by publication time.
Broken trust
In Des Moines, Iowa, Kristin Fairholm is the executive director of EyesOpenIowa, another nonprofit that received the grant money. She says because of the sudden cuts, her organization had to cancel programs, "which then created some ripples in the community, reputation-wise and trust-wise."
"You work hard to recruit these families to come with their teens to do your programming, and then you're canceling them," Fairholm says. "It's been disheartening for us to have to tear everything down."
She says even if the funding is eventually restored, this sudden cancellation and the uncertainty for the organizations doing this work will lead to more teen pregnancies and more sexually transmitted infections. "I worry for our young people," she says. "I think we're doing them a huge disservice."
The teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. has been trending steadily downward in recent decades, hitting a record low in 2025.
Evidence-based sex education programs have been successful in Republican as well as Democratic-led states.
McDowell, in Montana, says she's heard from many parents who are wary of comprehensive sex ed programs.
"I always like to drive home the point that education and values are not the same thing," she says. "When we teach sex ed, we teach facts, we teach communication skills, healthy decision-making; parents and caregivers teach the values that guide those decisions.
"So we teach facts; families teach values," she says. "And those are truly complementary, not competing roles."
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