The US Supreme Court will allow the Biden administration to withhold millions of dollars in aid from Oklahoma after the state refused to provide information about abortion providers to patients seeking abortions. In an order released on Tuesday, the nine-member court said it had rejected the state’s request for an injunction in a 6-3 decision. Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch were the three who would have granted Oklahoma’s request for relief.
Tuesday’s order reaffirms two earlier lower court rulings in which justices found that a lawsuit brought by Oklahoma against the Biden administration over clawback of the funds was unlikely to succeed.
The grants at the center of the legal battle, the Title X Family Planning Program, are distributed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In 2021, HHS created new rules requiring grant recipients to provide “non-prescriptive,” neutral information about health and family planning options, including abortion, and to provide people with referrals to health care providers, including those that offer abortion services.
The following year, HHS approved the grant to the Oklahoma State Department of Health but reminded the state that it had to follow the new rules. HHS reiterated this point even after the landmark 2022 Dobbs decision that overturned abortion rights in the country, according to court records. That same year, Oklahoma’s governor signed one of the strictest abortion laws in the country, but HHS determined that state law did not prevent the state from meeting requirements for neutral information about abortion and referrals to health care providers upon request.
Last March, Oklahoma received another Title X grant from HHS. To meet the 2021 rules, the state committed to providing a “national call-in” phone number to provide neutral information to patients. But by May, Oklahoma officials had removed the phone number, and HHS asked the state to comply with the rules within 30 days, but Oklahoma refused.
In September, the Department of Health and Human Services redirected $4.5 million in grant funding from the state to a Missouri-based group. Oklahoma challenged the move, and the state’s attorney general sued the Biden administration in November, alleging that Biden officials “exceeded their authority” by taking away the funds.