Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Effort to Force Hospitals to Halt Trans Youth Care |
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On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Mustafa T. Kasubhai issued a blistering 49-page written opinion vacating the Kennedy Declaration — the December 2025 declaration that threatened to revoke all federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid, from any hospital or provider that offered gender-affirming care for transgender youth, a virtual death sentence for any hospital system. The vacatur applies nationwide, eliminating the legal basis that roughly 40 hospitals cited when they shuttered their trans youth care programs earlier this year. It also bars the Trump administration from implementing the Declaration or any materially similar policy threatening providers’ federal funding for offering gender-affirming care. The ruling could have enormous implications in states like Colorado, where Children’s Hospital Colorado is fighting a state Supreme Court case while still citing federal threats as justification for refusing to treat trans youth, and in New York, where hospitals have come under fire under state nondiscrimination law. The ruling goes into effect immediately.
The case centers on the Kennedy Declaration, issued on December 18, 2025, which was widely covered at the time as a “nuclear option” against transgender youth care. The administration’s attack came on two tracks. First, CMS released two proposed federal rules barring hospitals providing trans care from Medicare and Medicaid. Because virtually every hospital in America depends on Medicare and Medicaid funding to survive, the rules would have functioned as a de facto nationwide ban. Secretary Kennedy, not content to wait for the long rule-making process, simultaneously issued the Declaration, which invoked an obscure HHS regulation allowing the department to exclude providers from federal health programs if they furnish care that “fails to meet professionally recognized standards of health care.” By declaring that gender-affirming care for minors was “neither safe nor effective” and therefore failed to meet those standards, Kennedy effectively short-circuited the rulemaking process — putting a chilling policy into immediate effect without notice, without public comment, and without any of the procedural safeguards required by law. HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart then began publicly referring hospitals to the Office of Inspector General for exclusion.
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