Since August, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) newsroom has been on a rural health blitz, peppering inboxes with near-daily press releases that claim to “announce” funding for various rural programs in states around the country. The messages follow a recognizable pattern: splashy headlines with dollar signs, quotes from Members of Congress who voted for the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), and promises of “strengthened” systems and “cutting-edge technology”.
If you live in a state that has been highlighted by a similar press release – or if you see one repurposed in your local paper or social media without context – here’s why you should take the announcement with a grain of salt.
Despite the headlines, the Administration doesn’t have new funding to announce. The HHS press releases document not new awards, but merely the way that states are slicing, dicing, and sub-awarding Rural Health Transformation Program (RHTP) funding announced almost a year ago.
As NHeLP previously explained, RHTP is a five-year grant program tacked onto OBBBA to secure the votes of lawmakers whose rural constituents raised significant concerns about the legislation’s disastrous effects. RHTP’s funding is a drop in the bucket compared to OBBBA’s trillion-dollar cuts, which will disproportionately harm rural communities. Last fall, HHS released an application that layered additional funding restrictions on top of those in the statute, including a 15% cap on the use of awards to pay for actual health care services.
Since awards were announced in December 2025, states have been engaged in the important but mundane details of early grants management, like planning, governance, and procurement. Some have begun to parcel out their award funds to entities that will actually carry out program work, like hospital systems, technology vendors, and other sub-contractors. States’ variable progress (and concerns about threatened clawbacks and award reductions by CMS) have been tracked by independent entities and the media, as HHS has not made this information publicly available in a transparent, centralized way.
So, why the sudden flurry of publicity documenting the routine progress of a comparatively small grant program? It comes back to the usual RHTP distraction techniques. By any measure, the Trump Administration has been a disaster for middle- and low-income people trying to access health care. Data provided by HHS itself confirms that more than 5 million people have lost Medicaid coverage since January 2025, including more than 2 million children. An additional 3 million people have lost Marketplace coverage, a number that has likely increased since federal data were last made public in February – and that’s not even including the recent announcement that CMS and health insurers recently mass-disenrolled 760,000 individuals on the basis of unsubstantiated fraud claims. During 2026 legislative sessions, states began to cut Medicaid benefits and provider pay to cover budget gaps and prepare for federal policy changes to come. All of this is already underway, with OBBBA’s worst effects still to come in 2027 and beyond.
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has spent the summer proposing questionably lawful (and unquestionably awful) rules that use OBBBA as a springboard to worsen the law’s effects on Medicaid beneficiaries and other health care consumers. We’ve seen this pattern again and again in the last few months, as HHS proposes rules tripling the harms of provider payment cuts, worsening Medicaid work requirements, and radically expanding provider tax cuts.
States and communities are doing their best to implement RHTP in the midst of unprecedented health care cuts caused by OBBBA. But at the end of a long summer of anti-Medicaid regulations, and as OBBBA’s harmful effects are becoming more and more visible, it’s hard to believe that the recent flood of press releases reflects an actual commitment to improving rural health. Rather, the Administration continues to exploit RHTP, hoping that a deluge of press releases will distract the public from its larger campaign to take health care away from those who need it most.
