Trump Admin Defunds Abstinence-only Programs In Chaotic Budget Cuts

The Trump administration's sweeping grant cuts are hitting sexual abstinence programs long favored by Republicans.

Earlier this summer, the administration abruptly terminated tens of millions in funding for groups teaching children and teenagers about how to prevent pregnancy and sexually-transmitted infections.

But unlike other federal funding cuts that the administration has admitted were targeted to hit states that did not vote for Trump in 2024, this purge included conservative Christian groups and others that have operated for years in red states teaching the benefits of abstinence to children and teenagers.

The issue will come to a head on Thursday, when a group of sexual health clinics and county governments square off with the Trump administration in a DC courtroom over the recent cuts and changes to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program that they say could cause a backslide in the significant progress the country has made in recent decades in reducing minors’ unintended pregnancies.

In addition to defunding some Planned Parenthood state chapters and health departments in states run by Democrats, the Trump administration sent termination letters in June to groups in Texas, South Carolina, West Virginia, Mississippi and other GOP-controlled states whose curricula stressed abstinence and healthy relationship dynamics, and accused them of “normalizing sexual activity for minors.”

The federal Health Department did not respond to questions about these cuts.

“Two of our curricula, for example, are abstinence-only, and we were very thrown for a loop that those curricula were called out in our termination letter," said Rena Dixon, CEO of the South Carolina educational nonprofit Fact Forward.

Like many program grantees, Dixon’s organization runs several different programs, some of which serve college students and other young adults older than 18 and include more frank discussion of contraception and healthy sexual practices. But she found it “very confusing” that their high school programs, which follow state requirements to emphasize abstinence and have received support from the state’s GOP-dominated legislature, got the axe.

“Nobody wins when something like this happens, and the young people pay the ultimate price,” she said.

The funding cut, which came three years into a five-year grant, forced her to lay off half her staff and put fall programming for thousands of students in limbo. Dixon said the letter she received announcing the termination of more than $1.6 million in annual funding accused her group of showing children a video that “depicted youth engaging in sexual activity.”

“That was not what was going on in the video at all,” Dixon said. “It was a discussion between two girls on a train, and one of them said that she had sex and her friend pushed back and talked about the consequences.”

As Dixon and other former funding recipients wait to see if a federal judge reverses the cuts, millions of children and young adults are losing access to classes that proponents say may have contributed to a 68 percent decrease in teen pregnancy rates over the past decade. 

The legal battle underscores how far right the Trump administration is pulling federal programs that have long enjoyed bipartisan support, to the point of killing services backed by conservatives at the state level. As the Trump administration shifts funding away from health programs that offer contraception and Republicans in Congress call for blocking taxpayer money to Planned Parenthood, the most recent overhaul strips funding both from more progressive programs and from conservative-aligned groups that for years have worked to warn teens about the dangers of sexual activity.

“They just stabbed abstinence educators in the back,” a Health Department employee, granted anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said of the cuts to conservative-leaning programs in red states. “They labeled all these abstinence-only programs ‘sexually explicit,’ and the abstinence-only developers were completely blindsided. Now there are all these lawyers calling HHS. It is a nightmare.”

The employee did not know whether the cuts to programs that appear to align with the administration’s priorities were intentional or accidental.

“Either they looked at the curricula and didn't understand how people modified it to be abstinence-only, or they looked at abstinence-only programs and they thought they weren't good enough. Or they threw everything in AI. It’s unclear.”

Some of the groups that lost funding, including Fact Forward, rushed to reapply in July under the new criteria laid out by HHS, which requires “body literacy” lessons and “reproductive life goals counseling;” bans discussion of transgender or nonbinary identity; and mandates an abstinence focus while discouraging contraception education.

Others, including Healthy Futures of Texas and the Planned Parenthood affiliate serving Iowa and Nebraska, did not reapply. Healthy Futures said it couldn’t complete the application in the few weeks HHS allotted because it had to lay off so many staffers due to the cuts. Planned Parenthood of the Heartland said in a legal filing that it didn’t reapply because its leaders considered the updated rules “counter to its core purpose” and feared following the new guidelines would harm the group's reputation with community partners.

Planned Parenthood of the Heartland joined together with the nonprofit Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, and the governments of Hennepin County, Minnesota, which includes Minneapolis, and King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, to sue the Trump administration for overhauling the grants in a way they argue clashes with Congress’ instructions for the program.

Their lawsuit accuses HHS of forcing grantees to “use non-evidence-based curricula that exclusively promote abstinence-only before marriage” and “ideologically-driven, medically inaccurate information, including misinformation regarding contraception.”

Grantees who lost funding told POLITICO the cuts came as a shock, stressing that they had revamped their sex ed lessons to conform to the Trump administration’s 2025 executive orders barring federal funding for “gender ideology” or “diversity, equity and inclusion” — and that HHS had approved them for more money since making those changes.

The termination letters included similar language accusing the grantees of not being “aligned with agency priorities,” but cited different reasons.

For example, the letter King County received cutting off the $1 million its local public health department was receiving annually to study the effectiveness of contraception education for teenage boys in the child welfare and criminal justice systems said its classes didn’t include enough information about the health risks of birth control.

In interviews with POLITICO, several grantees echoed South Carolina’s Dixon, saying HHS had cherry-picked examples from their lessons to paint an inaccurate picture.

“We received a termination letter that said we were normalizing sexual activity among youth, but the citations were taken out of context,” said Ginger Mullaney, the CEO of Healthy Futures of Texas, which has taught sex ed to more than 58,000 young people through the program over the last three years across San Antonio, Dallas and the Rio Grande Valley.

Several of the defunded programs used a lesson plan called “Love Notes” developed by the educational nonprofit The Dibble Institute, including some that used an abstinence-only version that focuses on teaching teenagers about healthy relationship dynamics and “does not include any contraceptive or family planning instruction.”

One piece of the curriculum HHS flagged, according to Kay Reed, the institute's executive director, was an optional module on “the negative influence on violent pornography” that the agency claimed was promoting porn to minors.

Reed said that was “not valid.”

"The passage is part of a warning about pornography and the harm it can do to young people's expectations and relationships,” she said. “It's not presented as encouragement.”

HHS defended the cuts in a legal filing in late July, arguing the groups bringing the lawsuit lack the evidence required for a preliminary injunction because they have suffered only “transient economic harms.” As for the lawsuit’s allegation that HHS’ stricter abstinence criteria undermines Congress, the government responded: “Congress did not require this type of programming, but it did not prohibit it, either.”

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program has long been in conservatives’ crosshairs. The first Trump administration made a similar attempt to abruptly terminate funding — a decision that was reversed by federal judges. President Donald Trump's most recent budget request called for eliminating it entirely, arguing the program “issues grants to problematic organizations like abortion clinics that waste American taxpayer dollars on abortion services and promote radical leftist ideology."