Trump Administration Caves After Avalanche of Opposition to Anti-Trans Hospital Rule

This story originally appeared on The Advocate.A flood of public opposition helped stop one of the Trump administration’s most extreme attempts to force hospitals nationwide to abandon gender-affirming care for transgender young people, offering a rare and instructive victory against a federal government that has otherwise moved aggressively to dismantle trans rights.The Department of Health and Human Services has abandoned a proposed rule that would have threatened hospitals with the loss of all Medicare and Medicaid funding if they continued to provide transition-related care to minors, NPR was first to report on Monday. The proposal, issued in December, never took effect.Its collapse followed more than 30,000 public comments submitted to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Nearly 20,000 came from Human Rights Campaign members and supporters, according to the organization. Equality California said major medical groups, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the Children’s Hospital Association, also urged the administration to withdraw the rule.The administration has not publicly credited the comments for its reversal. But former federal health officials and administrative law experts told The Advocate that the public record created through the comment process can expose legal weaknesses, force agencies to confront evidence they would rather ignore, and make a rule more difficult to defend in court.“It’s pretty rare for an agency to go to all the trouble of issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking and then decide they’re just not going to do anything,” Sam Bagenstos, a University of Michigan law professor who served as general counsel at both the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House Office of Management and Budget during the Biden administration, told The Advocate in an interview Tuesday.Agencies often revise a proposal after reviewing public feedback, he said. Walking away e