Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

14. Department of Health and Human Services · Minor

Use EMTALA and Section 504 to investigate born-alive infant cases

Not started

474 14. Department of Health and Human Services

“HHS should use EMTALA and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits disability discrimination, to investigate instances of infants born alive and left untreated in covered hospitals. CMS, OCR, and OIG should be required to follow through on these investigations with specific enforcement actions.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    All three of the agencies the Quote names have now been checked against their own published enforcement records, and none has done this. **OCR:** `hhs.gov/conscience` enumerates OCR's conscience enforcement actions back to 2008, and the seven in-window entries are a Notice of Violation to Illinois under the Weldon and Coats-Snowe Amendments (2026-01-21), a nationwide Dear Colleague Letter and three rescission or repudiation notices the same day, a Dear Colleague Letter to the Vaccines for Children Program (2025-09-04) and one to West Virginia health departments (2025-08-21). Not one is an EMTALA or Section 504 matter, and none concerns an infant born alive. **OIG:** its report search over 7,988 publications returns nothing for 'born alive', 'born-alive', 'Section 504' or 'conscience'; 'EMTALA' returns a single 2006 air-ambulance audit and 'abortion' a single 2007 New York Medicaid audit, both long pre-window. Its Work Plan of current and planned projects returns nothing for 'EMTALA', 'born alive' or 'abortion' (against 136 results for 'Medicare' and 31 for 'nursing', so the filter works). **CMS:** its EMTALA position in the window is the 2025-06-03 statement that it will continue to enforce EMTALA for all individuals presenting to an emergency department, which is enforcement of the statute generally and not the born-alive investigations this ask names. Federal Register full text for the window returns 2 documents for 'born-alive', neither from HHS (a State Department rule and a Fish and Wildlife Service listing finding), and the HHS Unified Agenda's 183 active RINs contain no born-alive rulemaking. The one in-window structural change on point is OCR's reorganization, approved 2026-05-14 and effective 2026-06-28, which restores a subject-matter Conscience and Religious Freedom Division enforcing the Church, Coats-Snowe and Weldon Amendments - it creates capacity for this kind of enforcement without evidencing any.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

  • One shared search covered the born-alive, EMTALA and conscience enforcement asks, #1308, #1309 and #1351.
  • Checked 2026-09-06 — both sources opened, and the second had been searched the wrong way, not blocked. hhs.gov can be read, and hhs.gov/conscience redirects to the OCR page whose “Past Actions” block is a complete, dated enumeration. oig.hhs.gov’s report search does filter when queried correctly — on both the report list at oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/ and the Work Plan’s project list. Both were tested with a nonsense term, which returns “No results found for your search criteria.” while real terms return counts, so these negatives are measurements.
  • The 2026-06-30 OCR reorganization notice was read in full at https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-06-30/html/2026-13142.htm; the strings ‘born’, ‘Emergency Medical’ and ‘504’ do not appear in it.
Action
other
Object
EMTALA and Section 504 enforcement for infants born alive
ID
1308