The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is tasked with ensuring the health and well-being of all Americans, developing strategies to address public health crises, and conducting research and designing treatment interventions to end deadly chronic diseases. It accounts for more than one-fourth of all federal spending and is made up of 11 operating divisions. Under the Trump administration, however, the agency’s mission has been upended by the harmful political agendas of individuals such as Vice President Mike Pence and Office for Civil Rights Director Roger Severino. Under their leadership, it has reallocated significant resources away from civil rights and patient privacy in order to expand religious exemptions, promulgate rules that severely restrict access to reproductive health care, and undermine strong nondiscrimination protections under the Affordable Care Act.
The latest example of this attack on civil rights is a proposed rule change that would significantly curtail the ability of millions of people to access critical programs and services. On Friday, November 1—the first day of National Adoption Month—the HHS announced that it would not enforce strong and comprehensive regulations requiring its grantees to ensure that federal taxpayer dollars are not used to fund discrimination and that it would seek to replace these regulations with weak and ambiguous ones. This is a heartless proposal spurred on by the same interest groupswho have lobbied to keep same-sex couples and LGBTQ people from providing loving and secure homes for children in the foster care and adoption system. But now, the HHS has expanded the scope of its discriminatory policies to include grant programs designed to promote the well-being of vulnerable children, families, older Americans, and individuals with disabilities.
This column outlines just a few of the ways that HHS programs provide critical support for LGBTQ people, the special interests that motivated the decision to remove these protections, and the ways in which this proposed rule would leave people vulnerable to discrimination when accessing critical services.