A federal judge in Pennsylvania dismissed a lawsuit by abortion-aligned organizations that claimed new HHS grant criteria unfairly shut them out of Title X family planning funds, ruling that losing a competitive grant process is not a legal injury.
U.S. District Judge Jennifer Wilson granted the Department of Health and Human Services' motion to dismiss the case without prejudice on Thursday, finding that the plaintiffs' central complaint amounted to little more than frustration with how a competitive funding process works. The two groups behind the suit, the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association and the Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania, had argued that revised Title X eligibility requirements "stacked the deck" against them. Wilson saw it differently.
The ruling ends, at least for now, a months-long legal effort backed by the ACLU to block HHS from steering Title X dollars toward organizations that do not promote abortion as a family planning method. The decision hands the Trump administration a clean win in one of several fights over how federal health dollars flow, and who gets to decide.
At the heart of the case was a Notice of Funding Opportunity, designated PA-FPH-27-001, that HHS's Office of Population Affairs announced in April. The NOFO laid out new criteria for Title X grants, the federal government's main family planning funding stream, starting in fiscal year 2027. Among its key provisions: grant recipients must show that no appropriated funds go to "programs where abortion is a method of family planning." The NOFO also required applicants to demonstrate "strict separation from prohibited activities" and to contribute to what HHS called "life-affirming, lawful, and ethical program delivery."
The new rules also committed to ending diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and practices within the grant program.
NFPRHA and FHCCP, represented by the ACLU and its Pennsylvania chapter, filed suit on June 18 in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania. Their complaint accused HHS of rigging the process, alleging that the NOFO "subverts the integrity of the Title X grant application process and, in so doing, enables Defendants to hijack the Title X program in order to give federal grants to entities that further Defendants' political agenda instead of fulfilling Congress's mandate." They wanted a court order blocking the new criteria.
HHS filed its motion to dismiss on July 31. Judge Wilson granted it, dismissing the claims as moot and delivering a pointed explanation for why the plaintiffs' theory of harm did not hold up.
From her memorandum and order:
"Plaintiffs allege that the NOFO 'stacks the deck' against otherwise qualified applicants. That is not a real and immediate harm; it is an inherent feature of competitive grant programs."
Wilson went further, noting that the entire purpose of a competitive process is to sort applicants by suitability. "In any grant competition, the criteria for selecting awardees are going to favor some applicants and disfavor others," she wrote. "That is the point of a competitive process, to identify the applicants best suited for the grant."
She also rejected the argument that the NOFO's scoring criteria were so vague as to constitute a distinct injury. "An ambiguous set of scoring criteria, applicable to all applicants, does not impact competition differently than a clear set of criteria dictated by the court," Wilson wrote.
The ACLU did not take the loss quietly. In a press release published Friday afternoon, Meagan Burrows, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, called the decision a mistake that would ripple far beyond the courtroom.
"Today's decision is legally wrong and risks harming the millions of patients across the country who depend on the Title X program for access to vital family planning services. We will continue doing everything in our power to protect people's ability to get the care they need to exercise their reproductive freedom, including from Title X providers."
Burrows also framed the case as part of a broader pattern, saying the court "refused to review this case on the merits and protect the Title X program from the Trump administration's attempt to undermine it." The framing is familiar: progressive legal groups have repeatedly cast Trump-era HHS policy changes as efforts to dismantle reproductive health infrastructure, even when the changes involve redirecting, not eliminating, federal funds.
Neither NFPRHA nor FHCCP responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation's requests for comment. The ACLU's statement stopped short of announcing a specific next step, though the dismissal was without prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs could refile.
The plaintiffs' legal theory rested on a premise that conservative observers will find revealing. NFPRHA and FHCCP did not argue that they were barred from applying for Title X grants. They argued that the new criteria put them at a competitive disadvantage, and that this disadvantage itself constituted an actionable harm. In practice, they were asking a federal court to guarantee that grant evaluation rules could not favor organizations whose missions align more closely with the administering agency's stated priorities.
Judge Wilson, who was nominated to the bench by President Trump in 2019, saw through that framing. She described the NOFO as "a generally applicable set of criteria that the agency will use to award points to applications", not a targeted exclusion. The ruling draws a clear line: the government can set the terms of its own competitive grant programs, and organizations that do not meet those terms have no constitutional right to a favorable scoring rubric.
The decision arrives as courts across the country continue to handle politically charged disputes over administration policy. In a separate case, liberal officials in New York filed suit to block a Trump public-charge rule just days before it took effect, part of a broader pattern of progressive legal challenges aimed at slowing or reversing executive action through the judiciary.
That pattern has produced mixed results. Some judges have sided with the challengers; others, like Wilson, have declined to intervene. The outcomes often depend less on the underlying policy than on whether plaintiffs can demonstrate a concrete, legally cognizable injury, a threshold the abortion-aligned groups failed to clear here.
The Title X program itself has long been a flashpoint. Federal law already prohibits Title X funds from being used for abortion services, but the scope of that prohibition, and how strictly HHS enforces the separation between grant-funded activities and abortion provision, has shifted with each administration. The new NOFO tightened that separation and added language about "life-affirming" program delivery, which the plaintiffs characterized as ideological rather than programmatic.
Wilson's ruling did not address the merits of that characterization. By dismissing the case as moot, she avoided ruling on whether the NOFO's specific language violated the Administrative Procedure Act or exceeded HHS's statutory authority, questions that could resurface if the plaintiffs refile or if a similar challenge is brought elsewhere.
Courts have increasingly become the venue of choice for groups seeking to block policy changes they cannot stop through legislation. The trend cuts across issues: from DOJ settlements over medical procedures to disputes over election rules and judicial decisions on politically charged ballot questions, the federal bench has become a primary battleground for policy disputes that used to be resolved in Congress or the executive branch.
Lost in the ACLU's rhetoric is what the HHS funding notice actually says. The NOFO does not ban abortion-supporting organizations from applying for Title X grants. It requires all applicants to demonstrate that their Title X projects "maintain strict separation from prohibited activities." It also requires them to show how their work contributes to "life-affirming, lawful, and ethical program delivery."
Those are conditions, not exclusions. Any organization willing to meet them can compete. The plaintiffs' real objection was not that the door was closed but that the criteria behind it favored applicants whose missions already aligned with the new requirements, in other words, pregnancy resource centers and similar groups that do not offer or refer for abortions.
That is precisely the kind of policy choice that an administration is entitled to make through the grant process. Wilson's ruling affirmed as much. And the fact that the case was dismissed as moot, rather than decided on the merits, suggests the court saw no reason to reach the deeper constitutional questions the ACLU wanted to litigate.
Several open questions remain. The total dollar amount of Title X grants at stake was not disclosed in the case filings. How many clinics operated by NFPRHA and FHCCP could be affected by the new criteria is also unclear. And whether the ACLU intends to refile, or pursue a different legal strategy, remains to be seen, despite Burrows's general pledge to "continue doing everything in our power."
For now, the administration's record in federal court on policy implementation has been uneven, but this ruling stands as a straightforward endorsement of the government's authority to set its own grant standards.
When the government decides how to spend taxpayer money on family planning, it gets to set the rules. Organizations that don't like those rules can adapt, or they can go to court, but a judge just reminded them that not winning a grant competition is not the same as being wronged by one.
