Court Tells HHS To Stop Using AI To Cite Fake Studies, Or Willfully Misinterpret Others In Grant Solicitations

To quote the opening line from the court opinion that this post is based upon, “Millions of American teenagers have sex.” This post is has nothing to do with whether that sort of thing is good or bad, natural or otherwise, nor the moral implications of it all. Whatever you think about that opening line, I think we can at least agree that teenagers engaging in sexual activity that results in unwanted pregnancies is something we collectively would want to avoid. The government, and HHS specifically, has offered up grants for programs that seek to reduce unwanted pregnancies in teenagers and, as the court notes, those programs appear to have worked.

Alarmed by the country’s rising teenage birth rate, Congress funded grants through the Teen Pregnancy Prevention (“TPP”) Program to support local initiatives proven to reduce teen pregnancy, as well as promising approaches that might also prove effective after further observation and study. Congress intended for these programs to employ a range of strategies, from encouragement of abstinence and delayed sexual activity to education about contraceptives. The effort seems to be working: The teen pregnancy rate has plummeted since Congress began funding the grants in 2010.

Good news all around, it would seem. But since the Trump administration never seems to miss an opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, HHS has decided to reinterpret, or you could say simply make up, what Congress intended to do with the money appropriated for these grants. Specifically, HHS has decided that this money will only be used for grants to fund programs that focus solely on abstinence and whatever the fuck “body literacy” is. The general idea is that any education or proliferation of tried and true forms of contraception are now verboten.

Several state counties, a nonprofit focusing on sex education, and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland filed suit to get the grant solicitation paperwork restored to its original state. As the lawsuit notes, neither HHS nor the Executive Branch are allowed to simply rewrite the mandates given alongside money appropriated by Congress. That is law-making by the Executive Branch by any plain reading.

And, to make matters worse, it appears that HHS wrote the grant criteria citing some studies that flatly don’t exist and citing others that don’t say what HHS says they say. The court agreed and issued a preliminary injunction putting a hold on the grant changes for now.

In his opinion granting a preliminary injunction as the lawsuit continues, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper called the changes “likely arbitrary and capricious” and said the government had failed to provide sufficient evidence for its policy. He wrote 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.” In seven cited articles, two appeared to be entirely made up and three others did not exist in the journals they were attributed to, according to Cooper, a judge who was appointed to the federal court in Washington, D.C., in 2014.

This has become a pattern for HHS under RFK Jr. In June of last year, Kennedy issued a report to Congress to support the changes his hand-picked CDC team made to COVID vaccine recommendations. That report included several studies that were unpublished, or that indicated within the study itself that it shouldn’t be cited because more research needed to be done, or which said something completely different than what HHS claimed they said. In May of last year, HHS released a “MAHA Report” on American health that once again claimed certain studies said something other than what they actually said, but which also included cited studies that could not be found upon inspection. The wide speculation was that the report was generated in part using AI that was going through one of its hallucination episodes. One wonders if the AI was doing drugs off a toilet seat with Kennedy himself.

In a real, functioning government, this sort of embarrassment would result in action by somebody, somewhere, somehow. Sadly, we don’t have that. We have a bunch of con-artists cosplaying as government officials instead. But as Kennedy stacks up the losses when it comes to his work and credibility, the calls for his resignation or firing are only getting louder.