HHS quits paying for kids' 'gender-affirming care' that was promoted under Biden administration

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Wednesday said his department has “ended funding for gender mutilation surgeries and other kind of gender dysphoria practices.”

Under the Biden administration, HHS advocated for “gender-affirming care” for minors, including surgical interventions.

In February, HHS rescinded previous guidance on this policy, saying it won’t promote or support “the so-called ’transition’ of a child from one sex to another” and will enforce laws that ban or limit such procedures.

Mr. Kennedy also said at a White House Cabinet meeting that his department is no longer involved in the issue of children coming across the southern border.

“We have ended HHS as the role — as the vector, the principal vector in this country for child trafficking. And during the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking and for sex, and for slavery,” he said. “We have ended that. And we’re very aggressively going out and trying to find these children — 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”

The Washington Times reported in August that the Department of Homeland Security lost track of 32,000 illegal immigrant children who failed to show up for their deportation hearings and rarely bothered to look for them, the department’s inspector general said at the time.

Nearly 300,000 other children during President Joe Biden’s term were not given immigration court summonses, the inspector general said at the time.

They were known as unaccompanied children. They showed up at the border without parents and were placed with sponsors in the U.S. while they waited to find out whether they could remain in the country.

Mr. Biden’s HHS was responsible for placing the children with sponsors, but it lost track of tens of thousands of them after the children and sponsors stopped replying.