Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent years denouncing the federal health establishment and pledged to replace its failures with “gold-standard science” as Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary.
His department has now been found using scientific citations that either do not exist or fail to support claims in official funding notices for the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP).
Earlier this August, a federal judge rebuked HHS for including such unreliable references. The citations appeared in new grant guidelines issued in 2026 that restructured the TPP.
This episode is particularly concerning because it follows an earlier incident in 2025: Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released a children’s health report containing invented studies, garbled references, and clear signs of artificial intelligence involvement.
The controversy stems from Hennepin County in Minnesota, King County in Washington, Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States’ lawsuit challenging Kennedy’s overhaul of the TPP.
Congress established the program to fund local initiatives shown to reduce teen pregnancy. However, HHS took a narrower approach in 2026, issuing grant notices that directed recipients toward abstinence education, “body literacy,” reproductive-goal counseling, and sexual-risk-avoidance education. A separate policy notice barred programs from encouraging or normalizing sexual activity for minors and required compliance with administration policies against “gender ideology” and diversity initiatives.
HHS terminated virtually all existing TPP awards, prompting the lawsuit.
On August 19, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the new policy. He found that HHS acted arbitrarily and capriciously.
The latest scandal involves HHS’s attempt to justify its “body literacy” focus—a definition encompassing understanding how a healthy body functions, including reproductive anatomy, physiology, hormonal patterns, and interpreting biological signals for informed health decisions. However, the cited scientific references were largely non-existent or unsupported.
Government notices referenced public health studies that appeared to be generated by artificial intelligence. Two out of seven cited works are entirely fabricated, while three did not publish in the journals they claimed but resemble articles from different publications. Additionally, there is no evidence of pregnancy prevention curricula that center on “body literacy” or other requirements imposed under the new TPP guidelines.
HHS acknowledged a “near absence of body literacy education standards nationwide,” yet it made this concept central to grant eligibility without providing adequate explanation.
The report released by Kennedy’s MAHA Commission in May 2025, titled “Make Our Children Healthy Again,” contained 522 footnotes. Investigations revealed that at least four citations were nonexistent and three mischaracterized real research. One purported study addressed adolescent anxiety and substance use during the pandemic; another claimed excessive use of oral corticosteroids in children with asthma. Neither paper was authentic.
The White House initially dismissed these issues as “formatting problems” before updating the report to replace the fabricated citations with legitimate sources.
