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WASHINGTON, D.C. — After penning a July letter to top officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) urging the reconsideration of the termination of grants awarded to Pennsylvania organizations for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program, U.S. Senator John Fetterman (D-PA) joined his colleagues in an additional bicameral letter to push the Department to reinstate the funding.

“As the fiscal year rapidly comes to an end on September 30, we are very concerned that your Department has failed to distribute over $100 million of the $101 million in funding Congress provided for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program. Your decision to terminate the vast majority of existing TPP grants this summer and your attempts to distort the program and impose illegal conditions on grant recipients have already halted critical work being done in states across the country to prevent teen pregnancy. While the court will prevent the funding from lapsing, grantees still need access to those funds to sustain their operations and serve their communities,”wrote the members.

The TPP program is a national, evidence-based program that helps improve reproductive health outcomes, promote positive relationships, and support healthy environments for youth across the country. TPP grants fund organizations that provide evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention and sexual health education to more than 10,000 Pennsylvanians. Two organizations, Family Health Council of Central Pennsylvania and AccessMatters, serve 24 counties in the Commonwealth that use funds from TPP grants.

In June, HHS cancelled 53 of 67 TPP grants nationwide. The following month, Senator Fetterman raised his concerns with the administration and questioned why HHS terminated funding for TPP grants awarded to Pennsylvania. Given how beneficial the TPP program has been for organizations across the Commonwealth and country, Senator Fetterman joined 92 of his Congressional colleagues in this additional letter as an eleventh-hour call to action for HHS to release the funds before the end of the fiscal year.

“Young people across the country have positively benefited from the programs funded by the TPP Program and would immediately suffer from direct service cuts and loss of access to beneficial support. For example, in Central Pennsylvania, more than 10,000 teens—many of whom are foster youth, have substance use disorders, or face mental health challenges—will lose access to these critical resources due to the discontinuation of funding for a single provider,” continued the members. 

Read the full text of the bicameral letter below and here.

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Dear Secretary Kennedy:

As the fiscal year rapidly comes to an end on September 30, we are very concerned that your Department has failed to distribute over $100 million of the $101 million in funding Congress provided for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) Program. Your decision to terminate the vast majority of existing TPP grants this summer and your attempts to distort the program and impose illegal conditions on grant recipients have already halted critical work being done in states across the country to prevent teen pregnancy. While the court will prevent the funding from lapsing, grantees still need access to those funds to sustain their operations and serve their communities. That is why we write to, once again, demand that you immediately reinstate funding for grantees of the TPP Program that your department cut off earlier this year. Both chambers of Congress sent your Department letters highlighting our initial concerns in July. We will not stand by as this congressionally allocated funding fails to be distributed, and we will hold you responsible for withholding these funds.

With just days left before the end of the fiscal year and your Department rightly enjoined by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia from implementing new funding conditions, we are concerned that the funds are now sitting unused, and, therefore, the communities served by the TPP program are suffering. The only reasonable path forward is to provide funding to the grantees that were previously subject to the Department’s arbitrary terminations. As of this writing, only $579,499 of the program’s $101 million appropriation has been provided to a single grantee. It is clear you have no practical plan to legally spend down these funds before they expire, and the best course of action is to simply renew the awards that were terminated.

Any additional delay in obligating these funds would risk further damage to the evidence-based programs fulfilling their congressionally directed mission of providing accurate and age-appropriate programs to reduce teen pregnancy. If funds are not made available to these longstanding, high-performing grantees by September 30, millions of dollars that Congress appropriated for this important goal will expire without being spent as directed.

The majority of the grants terminated by your Department were in the third year of their five-year cycle. Withholding these funds deprives teens across the U.S. of vital resources and threatens to unwind decades of progress made in reducing teen pregnancy. Young people across the country have positively benefited from the programs funded by the TPP Program and would immediately suffer from direct service cuts and loss of access to beneficial support. For example, in Central Pennsylvania, more than 10,000 teens—many of whom are foster youth, have substance use disorders, or face mental health challenges—will lose access to these critical resources due to the discontinuation of funding for a single provider. In South Carolina, the discontinuation of funds for another provider would impact over 6,450 youth and has already led to staff layoffs. These grants supported evidence-based programs that worked to prevent teen pregnancy and behavioral risk factors underlying teen pregnancy, as is required by law. With such little time left in the fiscal year, the only option available is to reinstate every terminated TPP grant.

Sincerely,