Supreme Court vacates Sixth Circuit ruling on Title X funds for Tennessee

The U.S. Supreme Court has vacated an abortion-related ruling by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals and remanded it back to the lower court, noting that the case became moot as it proceeded through the courts.

The case, Tennessee v. Kennedy (formerly Tennessee v. Becerra), centered on whether Tennessee must refer patients for abortions in order to receive Title X funding under a rule established by the Biden administration.

Key Takeaways:

• The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Tennessee v. Kennedy should be dismissed because the U.S. government rendered the case moot through its own actions.

• The Court vacated the ruling and remanded it to Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.

• Under the Biden administration, the Department of Health and Human Services required Title X recipients to counsel and refer for abortion, but this requirement conflicted with Tennessee state law protecting most preborn children from abortion. The state accepted the Title X funding but argued that it could not refer patients for abortions that were illegal under state law.

• The Sixth Circuit ruled that Tennessee must abide by the rule or it could relinquish the money, but after Tennessee appealed that decision, the Trump administration restored Tennessee's funding, making the case moot.

• AG Jonathan Skrmetti petitioned SCOTUS to vacate the ruling to prevent "disuniformity" among the circuits as well as an "undermining" of "the court's transformative Loper Bright decision."

The Details:

On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee v. Kennedy be dismissed as moot, based on precedent set in United States v. Munsingwear, Inc.

According to the Supreme Court, this precedent "established that when a civil case becomes moot while awaiting appellate review, the Supreme Court's practice is to vacate the lower court judgment and remand with instructions to dismiss. This prevents unreviewable, moot decisions from creating binding precedent or res judicata consequences."

The Backstory:

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and then-Secretary Xavier Becerra changed rules to require Title X grant recipients to provide abortion counseling and referrals to patients upon request.

Tennessee, which had enacted the Human Life Protection Act in 2022 to protect preborn children from abortion unless the mother's health or life is at risk, sued the HHS, arguing that the rule infringed on its sovereignty by forcing it to recommend abortion services that are illegal in the state.

In the Sixth Circuit opinion, U.S. Senior District Judge W. Eugene Davis said that Tennessee knowingly agreed to the grant's conditions when it applied for the grant and therefore must follow the rule, but that it was free to relinquish the $7 million in funding if it did not agree with the rule. Tennessee appealed that decision.

However, when Trump took office in 2025, the Trump administration restored Tennessee's Title X funding, making the case moot. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, therefore, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to vacate the Sixth Circuit's ruling.

Leaving the Sixth Circuit's ruling in place, he said, would risk "undermining the court's transformative Loper Bright decision" and create "disuniformity" among the circuits.

What did the Court decide in Loper Bright?

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled a 40-year-old legal precedent known as the Chevron Doctrine, and in doing so, limited the power of federal bureaucrats. Some law experts predicted that this ruling would impact future abortion-related court decisions.

Noah Feldman, Bloomberg Columnist and professor of law at Harvard University, explained the Chevron Doctrine, which was from a 1984 decision in the case of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (emphases added):

The basic idea of the Chevron principle was that, when a federal statute is ambiguous, the agency charged by Congress with applying the statute should take a first crack at interpreting the law. Courts would then defer to the agency’s interpretation so long as it was reasonable…

He noted that the legal difficulty with Chevron was that it made agencies, not courts, into the most important interpreters of law.

Skrmetti told the U.S. Supreme Court, "The [Sixth Circuit] decision ... neuters this court's effort in Loper Bright to move past Chevron deference, perpetuates uncertainty around HHS’s authority under Section 1008, and permits Congress to circumvent constitutional limits on its spending power by simply delegating to executive agencies broad authority to impose funding conditions."

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed and vacated the Sixth Circuit's ruling, remanding the case back to the lower court to be dismissed. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a brief concurrence that vacating was appropriate because the U.S. government rendered the case moot through its own actions.