Enforcing rules on protecting religious freedom and conscience rights in healthcare settings, especially on the issues of abortion and gender transition medicine, is becoming a top priority for the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services.
The HHS Office of Civil Rights announced on Monday a significant restructuring to revive the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division that was initially created by President Donald Trump in 2018 and dissolved during the Biden administration.
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OCR is the main law enforcement arm of HHS, overseeing voluntary compliance with more than 50 laws and regulations regarding healthcare best practices, including conscience rights, civil rights, and health information privacy and security.
Administration officials charged that the Biden administration HHS, led by now-California Democrat gubernatorial candidate Xavier Becerra, deprioritized cases involving alleged religious liberty violations, particularly among physicians or providers who claimed participating in abortion or gender transition procedures violated their consciences.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a press release on the change that reopening the dedicated conscience rights division will allow HHS to “defend these rights with clarity, accountability, and resolve.”
“This reorganization restores the HHS Civil Rights Division and the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division and strengthens the Office for Civil Rights’ ability to defend religious liberty, enforce conscience protections, and combat unlawful discrimination,” Kennedy said.
A high-ranking HHS official who spoke with reporters ahead of the announcement said that the move is to demonstrate that protecting religious liberty and “faith-filled Americans” is a top priority for the Trump administration.
“The division will stand for the principle that it is fundamentally unfair to coerce, treat differently, persecute, or penalize an individual or organization for acting in accordance with its religious or moral beliefs, when those actions constitute protected conduct under federal law,” said the HHS official.
The new division is slated to take on much of the OCR’s current caseload involving religious-affiliated cases.
The office launched its first conscience rights investigation of Trump 2.0 in April 2025 over allegations that employees at a major pediatric teaching hospital were fired for refusing to administer puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children with gender dysphoria.
This March, HHS started a sweeping investigation into possible conscience rights abuses in 13 Democrat-led states that require private health insurance plans to pay for elective abortions.
OCR has also taken action to protect religious exemptions for childhood vaccine mandates, healthcare worker conscience protections, and equal treatment for faith-based behavioral health providers.
“Restoring the civil rights division allows OCR to bring back its core identity and to build on OCR’s storied past to extend that legacy by eradicating anti-Semitism, restoring biological truth and robustly enforcing civil rights laws,” the senior HHS official said.
The HHS official told the Washington Examiner that the agency will be hiring additional policy and investigative staff for the new division, as well as a new senior executive leader for the division.
The reorganization will be effectuated next month, at which time an official notice will be issued in the Federal Register.
The new action comes on the heels of HHS publishing a report detailing the actions taken to date to eradicate “anti-Christian bias” from the department and across the federal government.
In December, HHS took steps to block federal Medicare reimbursements for hospitals and institutions that provide gender transition medicine treatments to minors, including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, and genital surgeries. The move was quickly stalled in the courts by lawsuits from Democrat-led states.
In March, HHS’s Administration for Children and Families undid a Biden-era regulation requiring foster families to affirm a child’s gender transition, which critics argued discriminatorily prohibited Christians from becoming foster parents.
