By LINDSAY WHITEHURST, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — There are just two Planned Parenthood clinics in South Carolina, but every year they take hundreds of low-income patients who need things like contraception, cancer screenings and pregnancy testing.

The organization has long been at the center of the debate over abortion, but its clinics across the U.S. also provide a range of other services. In South Carolina, Medicaid patients often seek out Planned Parenthood because they often have difficulty finding a doctor who accepts the publicly funded insurance.

A case coming before the Supreme Court from South Carolina on Wednesday could upend that option. That’s because the state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, is pushing to block any public health care dollars from going to Planned Parenthood.

Federal law already prohibits Medicaid money from going to pay for abortions, with very limited exceptions, and South Carolina now bans almost all abortions around six weeks after conception.

“This case is not about abortion. This case is about general health care,” said Katherine Farris, chief medical officer at Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.

Still, Republican leaders in conservative-led states have long said that no public health care dollars should go to an organization that provides abortions, and states should instead be able to direct that money as they choose. A few states already have cut Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood and more could follow if South Carolina prevails.

“The people in this state do not want their tax money to go to that organization,” McMaster said.

The Trump administration is joining South Carolina for the arguments on Wednesday, which are playing out against the backdrop of a wider push by abortion opponents to defund Planned Parenthood.

Health care advocates, meanwhile, say the effects of the case transcend abortion. The legal question at its center is whether Medicaid patients can sue over their legal right to choose their own qualified provider.

The American Cancer Society and other public-health groups say in court papers that lawsuits are the only real way that patients can assert those rights. Losing the ability to go to court would hurt their access to care, especially in rural areas.

“If no one is able to enforce the statute or no one’s willing to enforce the statute at the federal level, then it’s a right on paper only,” said Julian Polaris, a lawyer who regularly advises state Medicaid programs and health care providers. States could also move to restrict access to treatments like gender-affirming care if the court sides with South Carolina, he said.

One in five American women of reproductive age is now enrolled in the Medicaid program, said Heidi Allen, an associate professor at Columbia University. This means that finding providers who can offer quality family planning services — a requirement for Medicaid — is crucial for meeting the needs of those patients.

“It’s concerning that states would eliminate a site of care for politically motivated reasons, “Allen said.

The case stretches back to 2018, before the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide right to abortion, when McMaster first moved to cut Planned Parenthood funding in a fulfillment of a campaign promise. He signed an executive order removing Planned Parenthood from a list of providers for things like birth control, and sexually transmitted disease testing.

“There are plenty of good organizations that provide maternal health advice, counseling and care and we need more of those,” McMaster said last week.

His order was blocked in court, but since then judges have ruled in favor of similar moves in Texas and Missouri, said John Bursch, an attorney for the conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom.

“At the highest level, this case is about whether states have the flexibility to direct Medicaid moneys to best benefit low-income women and families,” he said.

He acknowledged that a win for South Carolina could curtail other Medicaid lawsuits, but suggested that could be good for the program overall because it would mean less money going to legal fees. There is also an administrative appeals process available, he said.

“No one is losing their access to health care clinics,” Busch said. If the state is allowed to cut off Planned Parenthood, Medicaid patients could go to one of 200 other publicly funded health care clinics in the state, he said.

In South Carolina, $90,000 in Medicaid funding goes to Planned Parenthood every year — a tiny fraction of a percentage point of the state’s total Medicaid spending.

Most counties in the state have already been federally designated as having too few primary care providers, said Amalia Luxardo, CEO of the South Carolina-based Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network. Fourteen of the state’s counties have no practicing OB-GYN physicians and five other counties have just one, she said, meaning many women already have to travel longer distances to find the right provider.

Planned Parenthood has flexible hours and can get appointments scheduled quickly, factors that bring in patients from around the state, she said.

“We are already in a health care crisis,” said Luxardo, whose group has filed court briefs supporting Planned Parenthood. “And when decisions like these negatively impact our constituents, the crisis is going to only increase.”

Associated Press writers Jeffrey Collins in Columbia, S.C., and Kimberlee Kruesi in Nashville, Tenn., contributed to this report.

By CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Medical Writer

Employees across the massive U.S. Health and Human Services Department began receiving notices of dismissal on Tuesday in an overhaul ultimately expected to lay off up to 10,000 people. The notices come just days after President Donald Trump moved to strip workers of their collective bargaining rights at HHS and other agencies throughout the government.

At the National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading health and medical agency, the layoffs occurred as its new director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, began his first day of work.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a plan last week to remake the department, which, through its agencies, is responsible for tracking health trends and disease outbreaks, conducting and funding medical research, and monitoring the safety of food and medicine, as well as for administering health insurance programs for nearly half of the country.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during an event announcing proposed changes to SNAP and food dye legislation, Friday, March 28, 2025, in Martinsburg, W. Va. (AP Photo/Stephanie Scarbrough)

The plan would consolidate agencies that oversee billions of dollars for addiction services and community health centers under a new office called the Administration for a Healthy America.

The layoffs are expected to shrink HHS to 62,000 positions, lopping off nearly a quarter of its staff — 10,000 jobs through layoffs and another 10,000 workers who took early retirement and voluntary separation offers.

Related Articles

FDA’s top tobacco official is removed from post in latest blow to health agency’s leadership

A Senate vote to reverse Trump’s tariffs on Canada is testing Republican support

Trump’s nominee to be the next Joint Chiefs chairman will face senators’ questions

Thousands of workers at nation’s health agencies brace for mass layoffs

Judge pauses Trump administration plans to end temporary legal protections for Venezuelans

At the NIH, the cuts included at least four directors of the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers who were put on administrative leave, and nearly entire communications staffs were terminated, according to an agency senior leader, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.

An email viewed by The Associated Press shows some senior-level employees of the Bethesda, Maryland, campus who were placed on leave were offered a possible transfer to the Indian Health Service in locations including Alaska and given until end of Wednesday to respond.

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington predicted the cuts will have ramifications when natural disasters strike or infectious diseases, like the ongoing measles outbreak, spread.

“They may as well be renaming it the Department of Disease because their plan is putting lives in serious jeopardy,” Murray said Friday.

Beyond layoffs at federal health agencies, cuts are beginning to happen at state and local health departments as a result of an HHS move last week to pull back more than $11 billion in COVID-19-related money. Local and state health officials are still assessing the impact, but some health departments have already identified hundreds of jobs that stand to be eliminated because of lost money, “some of them overnight, some of them are already gone,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.

Union representatives for HHS employees received a notice Thursday that 8,000 to 10,000 employees will be terminated. The department’s leadership will target positions in human resources, procurement, finance and information technology. Positions in “high cost regions” or that have been deemed “redundant” will be the focus of the layoffs.

Kennedy criticized the department he oversees as an inefficient “sprawling bureaucracy” in a video Thursday announcing the restructuring. He said the department’s $1.7 trillion yearly budget, “has failed to improve the health of Americans.”

“I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” Kennedy said.

The department on Thursday provided a breakdown of some of the cuts:

3,500 jobs at the Food and Drug Administration, which inspects and sets safety standards for medications, medical devices and foods.
2,400 jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for infectious disease outbreaks and works with public health agencies nationwide.
1,200 jobs at the NIH.
300 jobs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid.

At the CDC, most employees have not been unionized, but interest rose sharply this year as the Trump administration took steps to reduce the federal workforce. Roughly 2,000 CDC employees in Atlanta belonged to the American Federation of Government Employees local bargaining unit, with hundreds more who had petitioned to join in recent days being added.

But on Thursday night, Trump signed an executive order that would end collective bargaining for a large number of federal agencies, including the CDC and other health agencies.

The erosion of collective bargaining rights was decried by some Democratic lawmakers.

“President Trump’s brazen attempt to strip the majority of federal employees of their union rights robs these workers of their hard-fought protections,” Reps. Gerald Connolly and Bobby Scott, both of Virginia, said in a joint statement Friday.

“This will only give Elon Musk more power to dismantle the people’s government with as little resistance from dedicated civil servants as possible — further weakening the federal government’s ability to serve the American people.”

Associated Press writers Lauran Neergaard, Amanda Seitz and Matthew Perrone in Washington and Mike Stobbe in New York contributed.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By MATTHEW PERRONE, Associated Press Health Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Food and Drug Administration’s chief tobacco regulator has been removed from his post amid sweeping cuts at the agency and across the federal health workforce handed down Tuesday, according to people familiar with the matter.

In an email to staff, FDA tobacco director Brian King said: “It is with a heavy heart and profound disappointment that I share I have been placed on administrative leave.”

King was removed from his position and offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service, according to a person familiar with the matter who did not have permission to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Related Articles

Trump’s nominee to be the next Joint Chiefs chairman will face senators’ questions

Thousands of workers at nation’s health agencies brace for mass layoffs

Judge pauses Trump administration plans to end temporary legal protections for Venezuelans

Trump welcomes Kid Rock to White House for order targeting ticket scalpers

Nonprofit groups sue Trump administration over election executive order, calling it unconstitutional

Dozens of staffers in FDA’s tobacco center also received notices of dismissal Tuesday morning, including the entire office responsible for enforcing tobacco regulations.

King, who joined the agency in 2022, has been vigorously criticized by vaping lobbyists for ordering thousands of companies to remove their fruit and candy-flavored e-cigarettes from the market. During his time at FDA, teen vaping has fallen to a 10-year low.

His removal comes just days after FDA vaccine chief Dr. Peter Marks was forced out, citing health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s support for vaccine “misinformation and lies” in his resignation letter.

The latest changes mean that nearly all of FDA’s top leaders overseeing drugs, food, vaccines, medical devices and now tobacco products have resigned or retired in recent months.

The leadership vacuum comes as Kennedy moves to fire 3,500 FDA staffers and pushes ahead with plans to scrutinize ultra-processed foods, childhood vaccines, antidepressants and other long-established products.

The wave of departures means incoming FDA commissioner Marty Makary — who was confirmed last week— will inherit an agency without many of its top experts and a beleaguered workforce that has been rocked by weeks of layoffs and a chaotic return-to-office process. Only a handful of FDA employees are political appointees, with nearly all of the agency’s scientific reviews and decisions overseen by career officials.

Neither Makary nor Kennedy have said much about how tobacco policy fits into their plan to “Make America Healthy Again.” Despite historically low rates of smoking, tobacco-related diseases remain the nation’s leading preventable cause of death, blamed for more than 490,000 annually.

In recent years, the FDA’s tobacco center has been besieged by criticism from all sides including congressional lawmakers, anti-smoking advocates, and tobacco and vaping companies.

Politicians, parents and anti-tobacco groups want the FDA to do more to stamp out unauthorized vaping products that can appeal to teens, many of which are imported from China. Tobacco and vaping companies say the FDA has been too slow to approve newer products for adult smokers — including e-cigarettes — that generally carry much lower risks than traditional cigarettes.

Under King, the FDA rejected applications for millions of flavored e-cigarettes, citing insufficient data that the products would help adult smokers while not becoming popular with underage kids. Those rejections have resulted in multiple lawsuits against FDA from vape makers, including one that was argued before the Supreme Court in December.

The Vapor Technology Association, an industry group, has been running ads urging Trump to follow through on a campaign pledge he made to “save the flavored vaping industry.”

The FDA has authorized a handful of e-cigarettes for adults, mostly from major vaping brands owned by legacy tobacco companies, including R.J. Reynold’s Vuse and Altria’s Njoy.

Other recent FDA departures include:

Deputy commissioner for foods, Jim Jones, who resigned in February after dozens of his staffers were fired.
Director of FDA’s drug center, Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, who stepped down days before President Donald Trump took office.
The agency’s second-ranking official. Dr. Namandje Bumpus, who resigned late last year.
FDA’s longtime medical devices director, Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, who retired last summer.

Many deputies and senior scientists have also retired or stepped down in recent weeks.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

By STEPHEN GROVES, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — With President Donald Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” of tariff implementation fast approaching, Senate Democrats are putting Republican support for some of those plans to the test by forcing a vote to nullify the emergency declaration that underpins the tariffs on Canada.

Republicans have watched with some unease as the president’s attempts to remake global trade have sent the stock market downward, but they have so far stood by Trump’s on-again-off-again threats to levy taxes on imported goods.

Even as the resolution from Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia offered them a potential off-ramp to the tariffs levied on Canadian imports, Republican leaders were trying to keep senators in line by focusing on fentanyl that comes into the U.S. over its northern border. It was yet another example of how Trump is not only reorienting global economics, but upending his party’s longtime support for ideas like free trade.

Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., left, and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., confer as the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee meets to consider President Donald Trump’s nominations for the director of the National Institutes of Health, and the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 13, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

“I really relish giving my Republican colleagues the chance to not just say they’re concerned, but actually take an action to stop these tariffs,” Kaine told The Associated Press in an interview last week.

Kaine’s resolution would end the emergency declaration that Trump signed in February to implement tariffs on Canada as punishment for not doing enough to halt the flow of illegal drugs into the U.S. If the Senate passes the resolution, it would still need to be taken up by the Republican-controlled House.

A small fraction of the fentanyl that comes into the U.S. enters from Canada. Customs and Border Protection seized 43 pounds of fentanyl at the northern border during the 2024 fiscal year, and since January, authorities have seized less than 1.5 pounds, according to federal data. Meanwhile, at the southern border, authorities seized over 21,000 pounds last year.

Kaine warned that tariffs on Canadian goods would ripple through the economy, making it more expensive to build homes and military ships.

“We’re going to pay more for our food products. We’re going to pay more for building supplies,” he said. “So people are already complaining about grocery prices and housing costing too much. So you raise the cost of building supplies and products. It’s a big deal.”

Still, Trump has claimed that the amount of fentanyl coming from Canada is “massive” and pledged to follow through by executing tariffs Wednesday.

“There will never have been a transformation of a Country like the transformation that is happening, for all to see, in the United States of America,” the president said on social media Monday.

Republican leaders in the Senate have signaled they aren’t exactly fans of tariffs, but argued that Trump is using them as a negotiating tool.

“I am supportive of using tariffs in a way to accomplish a specific objective, in this case ending drug traffic,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters last month. He said this week that his “advice remains the same.”

Related Articles

Thousands of workers at nation’s health agencies brace for mass layoffs

Judge pauses Trump administration plans to end temporary legal protections for Venezuelans

Trump welcomes Kid Rock to White House for order targeting ticket scalpers

Nonprofit groups sue Trump administration over election executive order, calling it unconstitutional

Trump task force to review Harvard’s funding after Columbia bows to federal demands

While Trump’s close allies in the Senate were standing steadfastly by the idea of remaking the U.S. economy through tariffs, others have begun openly voicing their dissatisfaction with trade wars that could disrupt industries and raise prices on autos, groceries, housing and other goods.

“I’m keeping a close eye on all these tariffs because oftentimes the first folks that are hurt in a trade war are your farmers and ranchers,” said Sen. Steve Daines, a Montana Republican.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, said he would prefer to see the U.S. and its trading partners move to remove all tariffs on each other, but he conceded that Trump’s tariff threats had injected uncertainty into global markets.

“We’re in uncharted waters,” Kennedy told reporters. “Nobody knows what the impact of these tariffs is going to be.”