Update on TPP Funding: The Courts Are Pushing Back. The Fight Is Not Over

If you have been following along since June, you know what happened. On June 26, 2026, the Trump administration terminated 53 Teen Pregnancy Prevention grants nationwide, including Wisconsin's $1.162 million award, with no warning and no transition period. You know that PATCH lost $130,000 overnight. And you know that the administration did not simply cut the program. It replaced it with something built on a fundamentally different set of values.

If you need that backstory, you can find it here and here.

A great deal has happened since then. This post is about what's new.

Someone sued. And it is working.

On July 14, a coalition that includes Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, SIECUS, Hennepin County, Minnesota, and King County, Washington filed a federal lawsuit challenging both the grant terminations and the administration's new ideologically-driven funding requirements. Democracy Forward and Public Citizen Litigation Group represent SIECUS and the county plaintiffs.

On August 19, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper issued a preliminary injunction blocking the administration's new program requirements while the lawsuit proceeds. His ruling was pointed and worth reading closely.

The judge opened with a simple statement of fact: "Millions of American teenagers have sex."

He went on to find that the administration's new policy is "likely arbitrary and capricious," and that HHS "is not at liberty, under the Administrative Procedure Act, to impose conditions on grant recipients that Congress did not intend or that are unreasonable or unexplained." He noted that the court found "unrebutted record evidence" that abstinence-only approaches are ineffective at delaying sexual initiation and reducing adolescent pregnancy. And he flagged, pointedly, that HHS had cited studies that "appear either not to exist or not to support the propositions for which they are cited," calling it a hallmark of AI-generated citations.

This is a significant victory. But it is a partial one, and we want to be honest about its limits.

What the ruling does and does not do

The injunction blocks the administration's new abstinence-focused program requirements from moving forward while the case proceeds. It does not automatically restore the canceled grants. Wisconsin's funding, and the programs it supported, remain terminated for now. The judge noted that other court cases need to be resolved before he can address whether the funding can be reinstated.

The fight to restore that funding is ongoing. We are watching it closely.

Why this is bigger than a funding dispute

The National Women's Law Center recently published a detailed analysis of what is actually driving these changes, and it is worth understanding the full picture. The administration is not simply shifting policy priorities. It is implementing an ideological roadmap drawn from the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and a newer report called Saving America by Saving the Family, which argues that feminist freedoms have contributed to the "dissolution" of the American family. The report explicitly calls for restructuring federal programs to push young women toward early marriage and childbearing.

The new TPP replacement program is a direct expression of that agenda. It requires grantees to teach "reproductive goals counseling" centered on family formation, promotes fertility awareness over evidence-based contraception, and even requires programs to educate young people on the alleged "advantages and disadvantages of ovarian suppression," the administration's invented term for hormonal birth control.

The judge saw through it. The new program's focus on "body literacy," he wrote, "appears to elevate fertility and marital procreation over well-tested forms of contraception and pregnancy prevention." An educational program that counsels teens on avoiding pregnancy "without discussing the realities of unprotected intercourse and its alternatives," he continued, "would seem to defy social reality, common sense, and scientific evidence alike."

Where PATCH stands

PATCH is here. We are operating, serving Wisconsin teens, and sustained in part by bridge support from our community and a generous one-time contribution from a Wisconsin funder who stepped up when we needed it. We are not going anywhere.

We are also clear-eyed about the road ahead. The legal process will take time. The political landscape is volatile. And the canceled grants, including ours, have not been restored.

What gives us confidence is not just the court ruling. It is the track record. Courts stopped this same illegal move five times during Trump's first term, and the government dropped every appeal. The evidence has always been on our side. The courts are increasingly confirming it.

What you can do

Support PATCH: patchprogram.org/donate

Contact your elected officials and tell them Wisconsin teens are still waiting for the funding to be restored. You can take action directly at emboldenwi.salsalabs.org/TPPFundingCuts.

Share this post and our previous updates. The more people understand that this is not just a funding cut but an ideological substitution that a federal court has already found likely unlawful, the better.

We did not choose this fight. We are not walking away from it.

There Is Nothing Equal About This Amendment. Vote No on November 3.

On November 3, Wisconsin voters will see a question on their ballot that is easy to misread.

It asks whether the state constitution should be amended to prohibit governmental entities from "discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin" in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration.

Sounds reasonable. Maybe even familiar. Isn't discrimination already illegal?

Yes. It is. And that is exactly the problem with this amendment.

Wisconsin and federal law already prohibit discrimination. What this amendment actually does (what it is designed to do) is make it unconstitutional for government to use any equity-based tool to address the deep, persistent disparities that those laws alone have never been able to fix.

This is not an anti-discrimination measure. It is an anti-equity measure. And Embolden WI opposes it.

What Gets Lost If This Passes

The amendment applies broadly: to the UW System, technical colleges, every public school district, every local government. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which helped advance this measure, has been explicit about the goal: ending diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across Wisconsin's public institutions.

Here is what that means in practice.

Health equity programs designed to address higher rates of chronic illness, maternal mortality, and disease burden in Black and brown communities could be challenged or eliminated.

Education programs including K-12 equity accommodations, targeted scholarships, UW admissions support, and curriculum designed to serve diverse learners could be dismantled.

Community programs that use equity-based eligibility, including Head Start, food banks, homeless shelters, and domestic violence services, could lose their legal standing.

Workforce and contracting initiatives for women, the Wisconsin Supplier Diversity Program, and contracts for certified minority-owned businesses would be threatened.

What is gained? Nothing.

What is lost? Sixty years of progress: the tools Wisconsin has built to give more people a fair shot.

This Is What We Do at Embolden WI

I want to be clear about why this is personal for us.

Embolden WI exists because communities already have the power to create change. What they often lack is the infrastructure, resources, and support to act on that power. We exist to close that gap.

ECCHO, our two-year civic leadership program created for and by BIPOC women and non-binary leaders in Dane, Milwaukee, and Rock counties, is built on the premise that the people most affected by inequitable systems should be the ones shaping change. ECCHO participants design and lead their own community health and civic engagement projects. Programs like ECCHO exist because equity-conscious investment made them possible. This amendment would make that logic unconstitutional.

PATCH centers young people, particularly young people facing the greatest barriers, as leaders in health care design. It works because it starts from the reality that not everyone enters the health care system on equal footing. This amendment would prohibit public systems from starting from that same reality.

And through our fiscal sponsorship platform, we support eleven community-rooted partner initiatives, from improving maternal health outcomes for immigrant families, to advancing Parkinson's disease policy, to building civic power in Wisconsin's Kinyarwanda-speaking community. All of them are doing work that targets people and communities who have been systematically left out. All of that work becomes harder, and in some cases impossible, if this amendment passes.

We Have Seen This Before

This is not a new idea. Michigan passed a nearly identical amendment in 2006. Researchers have studied what happened.

Diversity in University of Michigan admissions declined. Representation in public employment for women and people of color dropped. Contracts with minority-owned businesses fell. The gap did not close. It widened.

Wisconsin's amendment authors, when pressed, admitted they conducted no research on existing programs or the real-world consequences of eliminating them. None. They proposed a permanent constitutional change that would affect millions of Wisconsinites, without doing the homework.

That is not governance. That is a statement.

Equality Is Not the Same as Equity

Here is the argument you will hear in favor of this amendment: government should treat everyone the same. No preferences. No special consideration.

It sounds fair. But it is not.

Treating everyone the same in a system that has never treated everyone the same does not produce equal outcomes. It preserves the gap. It encodes the starting line as the finish line.

Equity means ensuring that people have what they need to have a genuine shot, not just a formal one. When a Black woman in Wisconsin is significantly more likely to die in childbirth than a white woman, telling hospitals they cannot consider race in designing support programs does not make her safer. It makes the system more comfortable with her risk.

That is what this amendment asks Wisconsin to do. To make government systems more comfortable with the disparities that exist, rather than equipped to address them.

What You Can Do

Vote no on November 3.

Tell the people in your life what this amendment actually does, not what the ballot language implies. Share this post. Talk to your neighbors. Let the League of Women Voters, the ACLU of Wisconsin, and other organizations fighting this know they have your support.

And if you want to understand more about what is at stake for health equity in Wisconsin, and the community-driven work that depends on policies like the ones this amendment would eliminate, I hope you will take a few minutes to learn about what Embolden WI and our partners are building.

We are going upstream. We are building the conditions where fewer people are pushed into the river in the first place.

This amendment would dam that work. We are voting no.

For more information, please connect to and follow the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and access their Anti-Equity Constitutional Amendment on the November 3rd Balow Educational Toolkit

Thinking About Closing Your Nonprofit? Your Programs Might Not Have To

If you are on a nonprofit board right now having quiet conversations about winding things down, you are not alone, and you are not failing. Nonprofits close for all kinds of reasons: funding has shrunk to the point where audit fees and insurance premiums eat up money that should go to your community, the founder is ready to step back and no one wants to take on board and HR responsibilities, or the organization is simply too small to carry the compliance weight it was built to carry.

Here is the important distinction to hold onto as you think this through: the organization and the program are not the same thing. Your nonprofit's legal structure may no longer be sustainable. That does not mean the work itself has to end.

There is a real, legally recognized path for keeping a valuable program alive even when the organization running it can't survive: transferring it to a fiscal sponsor as part of your dissolution process.

What This Actually Looks Like

This isn't a workaround or a loophole. It is a well-established practice, sometimes called comprehensive or Model A fiscal sponsorship, described in the field's defining text, Gregory Colvin and Stephanie Petit's Fiscal Sponsorship: Six Ways to Do It Right. Gene Takagi of NEO Law Group has written about it plainly: a distressed nonprofit can transfer one or more of its programs to a fiscal sponsor, moving staff and volunteers over, so the sponsor provides the infrastructure and back-office support needed to keep the program running.

To be clear about what changes: your organization still needs to go through dissolution. This is not a way to avoid winding down the legal entity, and any nonprofit-law attorney worth talking to will tell you the same. Nonprofit law commentator Don Kramer has made a similar point: an organization that already holds its own 501(c)(3) status doesn't have the problem fiscal sponsorship exists to solve, since it can already raise tax-deductible funds directly. What changes is what happens to the program as part of your organization's asset distribution, which every dissolving 501(c)(3) has to sort out one way or another. Instead of the program simply disappearing when your organization closes, it can move to a sponsor that keeps it running.

In a comprehensive fiscal sponsorship arrangement:

• The program becomes part of the sponsor's own operations. It has no separate legal existence. Its assets, liabilities, and obligations belong to the sponsor, and by law, the program falls under the ultimate direction of the sponsor's board.

  
  

• Your staff and volunteers can move with the program. They generally become employees of the sponsoring organization, covered under its insurance and payroll.

  
  

• Day-to-day leadership usually stays with your program's people. An experienced sponsor typically delegates management to existing program leadership and rarely intervenes in programmatic decisions, as long as the program stays compliant with the law, the fiscal sponsorship agreement, and the sponsor's policies.

  
  

• Fundraising continues, but through the sponsor. All fundraising is done by authorized agents of the sponsor, so anyone raising money for the program needs to understand and follow the sponsor's fundraising policies going forward.

  
  

• You can build in an exit. Some agreements give an individual or committee connected to the program the ability to end the arrangement and move the program to a different fiscal sponsor if the relationship isn't working, a meaningful safeguard compared to a plain, no-strings transfer.

  
  

Why This Is Worth Considering

Funders increasingly understand this option too. A program that serves real people well, with real community trust behind it, does not have to disappear just because the nonprofit that built it can no longer sustain its own governance and compliance obligations. Fiscal sponsors that take on this kind of transfer give funders and donors a way to keep supporting proven work even through an organizational transition.

What the Process Actually Involves

If your board is seriously weighing this path:

1. Get honest about what's actually failing. Is it the mission, or is it the structure carrying the mission? If your programs are strong and your community still needs them, that is a meaningful signal worth exploring further.

   
   

2. Talk to a potential fiscal sponsor early, alongside your dissolution planning, not after. Sponsors will want to understand your programs, your finances, and your funding relationships before agreeing to take on staff, assets, and obligations.

   
   

3. Get legal guidance on the dissolution itself. Asset transfers, any remaining grant obligations, and final filings all need to be handled correctly and in the right order. This protects your board and ensures the transfer to a sponsor is done properly rather than informally.

   
   

4. Be direct with your donors, funders, and community about what is changing. People will have questions about what happens to their gifts, their grants, and the relationships they've built with your program. Address this clearly rather than letting people guess.

   
   

5. Understand the sponsorship agreement before you sign anything. What authority does the sponsor have over the program day to day? What is the administrative cost share? Is there a way out if the arrangement isn't working? A trustworthy sponsor will walk you through all of this without hesitation.

   
   

A Word of Honesty

This path is not free, and it is not a way to sidestep accountability. The fiscal sponsor takes on real legal and financial responsibility for the program, which is exactly why it has real authority over how the program operates and how funds are used within it. It is a genuine transfer of responsibility, not a rescue that leaves your original board in charge behind the scenes.

But if your organization is closing because the administrative load became unsustainable, and not because the work itself is finished, this is a conversation worth having before your programs disappear along with the entity that housed them.

Not every fiscal sponsor is the right fit for every program. Sponsors vary by geography, mission focus, and the models they offer, so it's worth looking beyond just one option. The National Network of Fiscal Sponsors member directory is a good place to see who else is doing this work and find a sponsor whose focus and footprint match your program's needs.

Embolden WI is a Wisconsin-based fiscal sponsor supporting organizations working in health equity, health justice, and civic health. If your nonprofit is heading toward dissolution and you're wondering whether one or more of your programs could continue under a fiscal sponsor, we're happy to talk it through, no pressure, no obligation.