Why Should Delaware Care?
Last year, Delaware hospitals faced threats from the Trump administration to cut their federal dollars over their treatment of adolescents seeking gender-affirming care. Now, the administration has redoubled its efforts, rolling out additional policies aimed at pulling Medicaid and CHIP funding from hospitals that continue to offer treatments such as, puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
Over the past two months, Delaware’s attorney general has twice sued the Trump administration, accusing federal officials of using executive orders and funding threats to restrict health care access to transgender youth seeking gender-affirming treatments.
Despite the legal challenges, federal officials have recently intensified their pressure on hospitals providing that care by opening investigations this month into several facilities, including Nemours Children’s Health, the state’s foremost pediatric specialty provider.
The moves came about six months after Delaware families searching for gender-affirming care for their children were dealt a sudden blow when Nemours announced it would no longer accept new patients into its gender-wellness clinic.
Nemours’ decision last year — which followed threats of Medicaid cuts from the Trump administration — meant longer waitlists, out-of-state travel, or no clear path forward for those families.
Linda, a Wilmington mother who asked Spotlight Delaware not to use her last name out of fear of political attacks, was among those families. She said she was forced last July to seek hormone therapy for her son through a family doctor in Maryland, after Nemours declined to provide the treatment.
“It’s not my favorite path, but it’s the path that we chose based on it really being our only option,” she said.
Now, Delaware’s already limited access to gender-affirming care for minors could shrink further, with the new federal investigations, as well as renewed threats to cut dollars to hospitals that provide the care for transgender youth.
In a December statement announcing the new policies, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was “answering President Trump’s call to action.”
“The federal government will do everything in its power to stop unsafe, irreversible practices that put our children at risk,” Kennedy said.
But Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings told Spotlight Delaware that such federal threats are “nothing short of cruel, and we have to fight back against it.”
Jennings’ comments echoed those she made last summer in a letter to Nemours, in which she urged hospital officials to reconsider their restrictions on gender-affirming services.
This month, she said Nemours has not responded to her letter. Still, Jennings said she is continuing to urge Delaware hospitals to provide care for transgender adolescents.
“You can’t appease someone who is hell-bent on destroying people’s lives. And that’s what’s happening,” she said.
Feds double down on gender-affirming care ban
Two weeks ago, Kennedy’s Department of Health and Human Services announced its investigation into Nemours and five other hospitals in a post on the social media site, X.
Making the post was the health department’s general counsel, Mike Stewart, who further stated that the six hospitals continue to “operate outside recognized standards of healthcare and entirely outside [DHHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s] declaration that sex-rejecting procedures for children and adolescents are neither safe nor effective.”
SIX hospitals located in SIX different states…
— HHS General Counsel Mike Stuart (@HHSGCMikeStuart) January 15, 2026
It is truly unfortunate that today I referred to @OIGATHHS for full investigation SIX more hospitals from SIX different states for allegedly failing to protect our children from sex-rejecting procedures- procedures that cause…
The other hospitals being investigated are The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; Boston Children’s Hospital; New York University Langone Health; Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago; and Doernbecher Children’s Hospital in Oregon.
Nemours did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
About a month before Stewart’s post on X, the Trump administration issued a series of policy proposals targeting hospitals that continue to offer gender-affirming treatments. Those included medications commonly prescribed to transgender adolescents, such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
The policies followed a string of directives and executive orders that Trump made last year, which sought to alter health care for transgender individuals and pull federal funds from hospitals that provided gender-affirming care.
This time, the new policies came directly from Kennedy’s HHS and included new threats to pull federal funding from hospitals that accept Medicaid or Medicare. The policies also sought to prohibit Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from covering those treatments.
Kennedy stated that certain gender-affirming medical treatments for minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, are “neither safe nor effective.”
Kennedy’s new policies come even after gender-affirming care had been scaled back across the United States. As of last August, at least 20 hospitals nationwide either restricted or completely cut off care for transgender youth, according to a report from NBC News.
Separately, more than 25 states have enacted policies as of November limiting gender-affirming care for youth, according to KFF, a nonprofit that monitors health care policy.
But Jennings, Delaware’s top law enforcement officer, has taken an opposite approach. In recent weeks, she has joined a coalition of states in filing two lawsuits against the Trump administration.
The first, filed in late December, claims Kennedy’s agency is unlawfully trying to impose a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care for minors without Congressional approval or required public rule-making.
The more recent lawsuit, filed this month, challenges another recent HHS policy that requires recipients of federal health, education, and research funding to certify compliance with an executive order Trump issued last year that rejected the concept of gender identity by declaring that “women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”
Last fall, HHS folded the executive order into its interpretation of Title IX – the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education programs.
Under that interpretation, Delaware Department of Justice officials told Spotlight Delaware that organizations that don’t provide health care, but instead engage in education or training related to serving transgender and nonbinary people, could also risk losing federal funding.
That shift could even threaten future support for Delaware’s planned medical school, they said.
In late 2025, Delaware was awarded $157 million through the Rural Health Transformation Program – funding the state plans to use in part to help launch the new medical school.
“We were awarded the funding, and they should not be able to cut it off, but we sued to make sure they can’t cut off any of the funding,” Jennings said.