U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper has issued a preliminary injunction halting controversial changes to federal grant solicitations made by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The ruling came in the case of Hennepin County, Minnesota v. US Department of Health and Human Services, decided on August 19, 2026.
HHS had moved to restrict grant funding exclusively to programs focusing on abstinence-only curricula and so-called “body literacy” approaches to sex education.
The department’s changes effectively barred grant recipients from promoting or teaching widely accepted and medically recognised forms of contraception.
Several state counties, a nonprofit focused on sex education, and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland brought the lawsuit seeking to restore the grant solicitation paperwork to its original form.
The plaintiffs argued that neither HHS nor the wider executive branch holds the authority to unilaterally rewrite the spending mandates attached to money appropriated by Congress.
Judge Cooper, who was appointed to the federal court in Washington D.C. in 2014, described the grant changes as “likely arbitrary and capricious” and said the government had failed to provide sufficient evidence for its policy.
Most strikingly, Cooper found that grant solicitations for the program “(remarkably) reference public health studies that appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited — a hallmark of AI-generated citations.”
Of seven cited articles, two appeared to be entirely fabricated and three others did not exist in the journals to which they were attributed, according to Cooper’s written opinion.
Cooper’s injunction blocks HHS from continuing to enforce the abstinence-only mandate against remaining grant recipients, but stops short of reinstating approximately $67 million in funding already stripped from programmes nationwide.
The judge noted that it was unclear whether he held the legal authority to order those grants restored, leaving that question for further proceedings in the case.
Both sides were directed to submit a proposed schedule by September 1, 2026, as the litigation moves forward.
This is not the first time HHS has faced scrutiny over AI-generated content, with the department’s previous “Make America Healthy Again” report also found to contain references to non-existent articles and multiple citation errors.
The repeated pattern of fabricated or misrepresented research raises serious questions about the integrity of federal policymaking processes under the current administration.