Published December 19, 2025
On December 19, 2025, EPPC filed an amicus brief in the Third Circuit case Little Sisters of the Poor v. Pennsylvania arguing that the district court erred when it struck down the Trump Administration’s 2018 religious exemption from the federal contraception mandate.
The Trump Administration created the challenged religious exemption to end the longstanding religious liberty struggle over the federal contraception mandate. The mandate generally requires employers to provide beneficiaries on employer-sponsored plans with free access to all FDA-approved contraceptives (a category that includes abortifacient drugs). But the district court claimed this was irrational because the “accommodation” that federal agencies created in 2012 adequately addressed any religious liberty concerns.
The district court rooted its ruling in the Third Circuit’s 2015 holding in Geneva College v. HHS, which rejected employers’ claims that the “accommodation” burdened their religious exercise. Geneva College held that the accommodation was an “opt out” that shifted the responsibility to deliver contraceptives from a religious employer to its third-party administration (TPA). The Third Circuit claimed that the Department of Labor had the power to reassign the duty to provide contraceptives to a religious employer’s TPA, and religious employers could not legitimately claim to be burdened by the independent actions of third parties.
EPPC’s amicus brief claims that the Third Circuit was wrong to reject religious employers’ complicit claims. It shows that, under ERISA, only an employer—and not the Department of Labor—can give a TPA new legal duties. The brief shows that the Third Circuit got this wrong because it deferred to federal agencies and other courts instead of checking these claims against federal law. The brief asks the Third Circuit to correct its error in Geneva College and uphold the 2018 religious employer exemption.
Eric Kniffin is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he works on a range of initiatives to protect and strengthen religious liberty as part of EPPC’s Administrative State Accountability Project.
