A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by two pro-abortion organizations that tried to block HHS from prioritizing life-affirming pregnancy centers in its Title X funding process, ruling that losing a fair competition is not a legal injury.
Judge Jennifer Wilson of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania threw out the case on Thursday, granting the government's motion to dismiss without prejudice and finding that the plaintiffs' claims were moot. The ruling hands the Trump administration a clear win in its effort to redirect federal family-planning dollars away from organizations that treat abortion as a method of family planning.
The National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association and the Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania filed the suit on June 18, 2026, with legal backing from the ACLU and its Pennsylvania chapter. Their target: a Notice of Funding Opportunity issued by the HHS Office of Population Affairs in April that set new eligibility standards for Title X grants beginning in fiscal year 2027.
Title X is the federal government's main family-planning grant program. The new funding notice states plainly that none of the appropriated money "shall be used in programs where abortion is a method of family planning," and it requires grant applicants to show "strict separation from prohibited activities." It also commits to ending diversity, equity, and inclusion policies among grant recipients.
The plaintiffs called that a rigged process. Their June complaint alleged that the funding notice "subverts the integrity of the Title X grant application process" and "enables Defendants to hijack the Title X program in order to give federal grants to entities that further Defendants' political agenda." They claimed the new criteria would shut them out of a competition they had previously entered on equal footing.
The judge was unpersuaded. Wilson, a Trump nominee confirmed in 2019, found that the plaintiffs had failed to show the kind of concrete, immediate injury required to keep a case alive in federal court. As the Daily Caller News Foundation reported, she dismissed every claim as moot and granted the government's July 31 motion to dismiss.
Her reasoning cut to the core of the plaintiffs' theory. Wilson wrote in 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."
She went further, explaining the basic logic of any competitive grant process:
"In any grant competition, the criteria for selecting awardees are going to favor some applicants and disfavor others. That is the point of a competitive process, to identify the applicants best suited for the grant."
Wilson also rejected the argument that the funding notice's scoring criteria were so vague as to give the government unfair discretion. She wrote that "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."
In plain terms: every grant program picks winners and losers. That is what criteria are for. The plaintiffs' complaint amounted to an objection that the government's priorities had changed, and that they no longer matched the plaintiffs' own.
The ACLU responded Friday afternoon with a press release expressing displeasure. Meagan Burrows, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project, said the organization was "deeply disappointed that the court refused to review this case on the merits."
Burrows added:
"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."
Neither the NFPRHA nor the Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania responded to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. The ACLU also did not respond to the outlet's inquiry.
Because Wilson dismissed the case without prejudice, the plaintiffs retain the option to refile. Whether they will, and on what grounds, remains an open question. The ACLU's statement pledged continued action but offered no specifics on next steps.
The HHS funding notice at the center of the dispute does not ban any organization from applying for Title X grants. It sets conditions. Applicants must demonstrate that their projects "maintain strict separation from prohibited activities", meaning abortion, and must "contribute to broader HHS efforts to safeguard life-affirming, lawful, and ethical program delivery."
That language tracks a longstanding statutory restriction on Title X funds. The program has never been authorized to pay for abortion services. What the new notice does is make the separation requirement explicit and enforceable at the application stage, rather than leaving it as a post-award compliance matter.
The plaintiffs framed this as a political hijacking. Their complaint accused HHS of using the grant process to reward allies and punish organizations that provide or refer for abortions. But Wilson's ruling undercut that theory at its foundation: the criteria apply equally to every applicant, and the government has broad discretion to define what makes a grantee "best suited" for a federal program.
The new restrictions take effect in fiscal year 2027. Until then, the current grant cycle continues under existing terms.
The ACLU and its clients wanted a federal judge to dictate the terms of a grant competition so that organizations offering abortion services could not be disfavored. Wilson declined. Her ruling rested on a principle that any taxpayer would recognize: when the government hands out money, it gets to set the rules about how that money is spent.
The plaintiffs' real grievance is not that the process is unfair. It is that the process now reflects priorities they oppose, priorities that draw a firm line between family planning and abortion. For decades, that line was blurred. The current administration is drawing it clearly, and the organizations that benefited from the ambiguity are unhappy about it.
None of the three plaintiff organizations responded to press inquiries. The ACLU's public statement called the decision wrong but did not identify a specific legal error. The dismissal without prejudice leaves a door open, but walking through it will require the plaintiffs to articulate an actual injury, something Wilson concluded they have not yet done.
When the government says taxpayer dollars should not fund programs that treat abortion as family planning, and a court agrees that enforcing that standard is not discrimination but competition, the losing side has a messaging problem, not a legal one.
