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Supreme Court won’t stop Biden administration from withholding Title X funding from Oklahoma
Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request from Oklahoma officials seeking to restore federal family planning grant funding to the state’s health department after it refused to offer patients a hotline phone number that would provide counseling on pregnancy options, including abortion.
The justices turned down the bid for emergency relief from the state, which had asked the Supreme Court to temporarily stop the Department of Health and Human Services from withholding $4.5 million in federal Title X funding from the Oklahoma State Department of Health. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch said they would have granted Oklahoma’s request.
The dispute is the latest involving abortion to land before the nation’s highest court in the wake of its June 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade. As more than half of the states banned or imposed stringent restrictions on abortions following the ruling, including Oklahoma, the Biden administration has sought to protect access at the federal level, including through an emergency care law that was at the center of a dispute before the justices in its most recent term.
The fight over Title X funding
The rule that gave rise to the case involving Title X funding for Oklahoma was announced in October 2021, months before Roe’s reversal. It requires Title X projects to offer pregnant patients “nondirective counseling” about family planning options, including abortion, as well as information about where services can be obtained if requested by a patient.
The Oklahoma State Department of Health received a Title X grant in 2022, which was used to provide funding to city and county health departments. After the Supreme Court rolled back the constitutional right to abortion, the department and the Biden administration discussed changing the counseling and referral policies for its Title X project, as a new Oklahoma law outlawed abortion, according to court filings. The measure also made it a felony for a person to advise or procure an abortion for a pregnant woman.
The two entities reached an agreement under which the state health department could comply with the 2021 rule by ensuring interested Title X patients were offered the phone number of a national hotline that would provide counseling and referral information. Based on the accommodation, the Department of Health and Human Services agreed to provide $4.5 million to the state agency from April 2023 through March 2024.
But the Oklahoma health department soon reversed course and said Title X patients who seek pregnancy counseling wouldn’t be provided with the call-in number, according to a Justice Department filing. As a result, the Biden administration eventually terminated the award because it said the state was violating its 2021 rule.
Oklahoma officials sued the federal government over its decision and sought to temporarily block termination of its award and force the Department of Health and Human Services to provide additional funding in the future. The state argued the Biden administration violated the Constitution’s Spending Clause and a federal conscience law known as the Weldon Amendment by withholding the Title X funds.
The Department of Health and Human Services prevailed before the federal district court and U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. The appeals court ruled that Congress allowed the federal government to determine eligibility for Title X grants, which are subject to conditions deemed appropriate by the secretary of health and human services.
The divided 10th Circuit three-judge panel also found it unlikely that the Biden administration violated the Weldon Amendment, in part because the state failed to prove that the federal government discriminated against it for declining to refer pregnant women for abortions.
Oklahoma’s Supreme Court request
In seeking relief from the Supreme Court, Oklahoma officials claimed the state department of health was stripped of $4.5 million “solely” because it will not provide abortion referrals. They said the Title X funds are crucial to Oklahoma’s provision of family planning services through local health departments, and warned that depriving the state’s rural and urban communities of Title X services would be “devastating.”
Citing Supreme Court precedent, the state argued the federal government cannot impose on it an obligation to provide abortion referrals when it is not clearly required by Title X.
“HHS’s regulation foists upon Oklahoma a requirement concerning an issue that has been recognized as specifically reserved to the people to address in Dobbs,” Oklahoma officials wrote in a filing, referring to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision reversing Roe. They continued, “HHS deliberately sought to impose the executive branch’s policy preferences on the states, including Oklahoma, and upset the federal-state balance on this important issue.”
But the Justice Department argued that nothing in the case impacts Oklahoma’s ability to regulate abortion within its borders and questioned how referring patients to a hotline could violate the state’s prohibition on advising or procuring an abortion.
The Oklahoma State Department of Health could also decline the Title X award, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in a filing.
“HHS determined that counseling and referral are ‘critical for the delivery of quality, client-centered care.’ Without them, patients would be deprived of neutral information about ‘all pregnancy options,'” she wrote. “That runs squarely counter to Title X’s fundamental goal.”
Oklahoma had asked the Supreme Court to issue its decision by Aug. 30, the Biden administration’s deadline for when it would begin distributing the federal dollars to other entities.
A similar dispute over Title X funding for Tennessee is also playing out in the courts. That case involves a $7 million grant the Biden administration declined to issue after the state wouldn’t agree to provide Title X patients with the national call-in hotline where operators would supply them with referral information.
Tennessee, like Oklahoma, outlawed most abortions in the state after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and said it would only offer to provide information and counseling for “all options that are legal” in the state.
A federal district court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit declined to block the Biden administration from discontinuing the funding.
Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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