Pappas and Over 120 Members Urge HHS to Fund Title X Grants to Protect Critical Reproductive Care After Significant Delay

On Monday, Congressman Chris Pappas (NH-01) and over 120 Members sent a letter to Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert Kennedy urging him to extend Title X grants that provide critical family planning funding to health care centers across the country after HHS failed to provide guidance for months. Title X-funded health centers are lifelines in their communities, providing high-quality family planning and sexual health care, including cancer screenings, testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, HIV testing, contraceptive services and supplies, pregnancy testing, and other essential health care services.

In their letter, the members demand that HHS immediately award a one-year full funding extension to all current Title X grantees. This extension is critical because HHS failed to release the funding guidelines for months, only to release them late last Friday and give applicants only one week to submit their materials. HHS’s rushed approach could delay critical funding to grantees.

In their letter, the Members explained that Title X funding is critical to providing high-quality family planning and sexual health care: “The bipartisan Title X program, championed by then-Congressman George H.W. Bush and signed into law by President Nixon, served 2.8 million people in 2023. For many of those patients, especially in rural and underserved communities, Title X health centers are their only source of health care. In 2023 alone, Title X supported 3,853 health centers across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories and performed 461,085 cervical cancer screenings. These screenings have helped lower cervical cancer rates by more than half since the mid-1970s. Without timely access to the Year 5 funding of grants they have already been awarded, Title X clinics will be left without the needed support to continue to provide these screenings, contraceptive supplies, and other critical services.”

The Members also detailed how the failure to extend Title X funding is yet another example of Republicans attacking essential reproductive health care: “The failure to release guidance and open applications on time is yet another example of this administration’s ongoing assault on the Title X program, birth control, and reproductive health care access more broadly. In March 2025, HHS illegally withheld $65.8 million in Congressionally appropriated funding for the Title X program from 16 grantees with grants in 23 states, threatening essential health care access for an estimated 842,000 people, or 30 percent of all Title X patients. Many of these affected grantees still struggle to sustain the financial burden caused by that extended delay in funding. The attacks on reproductive health care from this administration and congressional Republicans continued with an estimated 15 million Americans poised to lose health insurance under Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans’ failure to extend Affordable Care Act tax credits, and a budget proposal and partisan spending bill for FY2026 that sought to eliminate the Title X program entirely.”

The Members closed by urging HHS to extend funding to protect essential health care: “Undermining Title X will unquestionably result in the loss of health care for patients who depend on it. Title X grantees were already awarded these funds. Those who rely on these services should not be punished by HHS’s inadequate planning. We urge you to award all Title X grantees a full funding extension for the next year before April 1. Do not stifle the life-saving work of Title X-funded centers that have helped women and families across our country for decades.”

Read the full letter here.