Marsha Blackburn Tommy Tuberville LGBTQ Rights Alabama Tennessee

Marsha Blackburn and Tommy Tuberville Signed a Bill to Ban Federal Money for Studying Trans Kids' Care. Two Weeks Later, Trump's Medicare Agency Moved to End the Coverage.

S. 5202 would bar federal funds from any research or publication on gender transition in minors. Blackburn and Tuberville cosponsored it on July 30 — two weeks before Medicare's agency published the rule ending Medicaid coverage for the care itself. Both are running for governor.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 23, 2026

On July 30, seven Republican senators put their names on a bill called the Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act. Two of them were Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

Read the name again, because the name is the whole story. Not harmful care. Harmful research.

S. 5202 does not ban a treatment. It bans finding out about one. In Blackburn's own words, the bill would "prohibit the use of federal funds for any research or study on gender transition surgeries for minors." Sen. Mike Lee of Utah is the sponsor; Blackburn, Tuberville, Ted Cruz, Steve Daines, Cynthia Lummis and James Lankford signed on. It was read twice and sent to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, where it sits.

The timing tells you what this is

They went after the research first.

Two weeks after this bill was filed, Trump's Medicare agency published a rule barring state Medicaid and CHIP plans from covering puberty blockers, hormones or surgery for minors. It hit the Federal Register on August 13 and takes effect October 13. Kids already on hormone therapy get six more months of federal money, and then it stops.

So the order is the reverse of what you would guess. The bill to keep the federal government from ever funding a study of what happens to these kids was filed and referred to committee before the coverage was taken away — not after, as a tidy-up. Whatever these senators knew was coming, the study went on the chopping block first.

That is not a policy that protects anyone. You cannot protect children from a treatment by refusing to learn its outcomes. If the treatment is as dangerous as these senators say it is, research is the thing that would prove it. A ban on research is only useful if you would rather not know.

What they said about it

The three senators quoted in Blackburn's announcement did not make a scientific argument. They made a rhetorical one.

Lee: "Why is the federal bureaucracy in the child mutilation business?" And: "President Trump rightly halted this attack on America's kids."

Lankford: "For too long, taxpayers have been forced to fund sex-rejecting studies on kids."

Blackburn: taxpayers "should not be spending a penny on research done by those who want to push harmful gender transition surgeries and radical gender ideology on our kids."

Notice what's missing from all three. No study is named. No finding is disputed. No researcher is accused of anything specific. The case against the research is that the people doing it are assumed to want the wrong answer.

Federal health research funding does not work that way, and these senators know it. A grant is reviewed, the methods are public, and the results are published whether or not anyone likes them. Cutting the funding doesn't correct a bias. It just ends the record.

Two senators running for governor, spending their Senate time here

Here is the part their own voters should weigh.

Blackburn's Senate term runs to 2031 and she is running for governor of Tennessee anyway — if she wins, she gets to name her own replacement in the Senate. Tuberville's term ends in January, and he is running for governor of Alabama. Both are asking their states to hand them the job of managing hospitals, schools, budgets and rural health systems.

The bill these two chose to put their names on while running for those jobs does nothing for either state. It removes federal research dollars from a field that affects a very small number of children, in a country where the Medicaid money for that care is already being taken away.

This is the same lane Tennessee's congressional delegation keeps working. Rep. Diana Harshbarger celebrated the Medicaid cutoff and then said she "will not rest" until Congress bans the care outright, with $100,000 penalties per violation. And it's the same playbook as the surrogacy bill twenty-five Republicans we track have signed — a bill about a handful of families, aimed at a much larger audience.

The pattern is the point

Ban the research. Ban the coverage. Ban the care.

Each step is defended with the others as evidence — the treatment must be dangerous, look how much of it we've prohibited. And the step Blackburn and Tuberville put their names on is the one that makes sure nobody can check.

Tennessee and Alabama both vote November 3.