(The Epoch Times)—The Supreme Court on April 21 will hear a case about the constitutionality of a federal panel that issues mandates requiring insurers to cover preventive medical services without cost to patients.
In Kennedy v. Braidwood Management Inc., the justices will consider the constitutionality of a federal law that allowed the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to make binding recommendations about preventive medical services, such as medications and screenings. The legal provision is in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, which was enacted in 2010.
The task force, housed within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) now led by Trump appointee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., describes itself as “an independent, volunteer panel of national experts in disease prevention and evidence-based medicine,” who work “to improve the health of people nationwide by making evidence-based recommendations about clinical preventive services.”
Texas-based Braidwood Management sued over mandates that the task force approved to which the company expressed religious objections. The mandates cover HIV prevention medicine, sexually transmitted disease screenings, and various treatments.
The case is one of several in recent years that aim to restore constitutional checks and balances, a legal expert told The Epoch Times.
The Supreme Court has been accepting cases in recent years in an effort “to rein in the administrative state,” John Bursch, senior counsel at the Alliance Defending Freedom, a public interest law firm, told The Epoch Times.
“It’s part of this trend over the last 20 to 25 years that [is] seeking to restore some of the original checks and balances in the Constitution,” he said, adding that “one of those efforts culminated in Loper Bright.”
In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), the high court overturned the Chevron deference doctrine, a bureaucracy-empowering rule that provided a legal foundation for the modern administrative state.
According to the government’s September 2024 petition, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit held in June 2024 that the task force’s mandates were invalid because the structure of the task force violates the Constitution’s appointments clause.
That clause provides that the president may appoint officers to assist him in carrying out his responsibilities. Principal officers must be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, but inferior officers may be appointed by the president alone, the head of an executive department, or a court.
The mandates could not be upheld because the task force members were not appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, the Fifth Circuit found, according to the petition.
The federal district court was correct to block HHS from enforcing the mandates, the circuit court stated, according to the petition.
The federal government argued in its petition that the Fifth Circuit’s ruling “jeopardizes healthcare protections that have been in place for 14 years and that millions of Americans currently enjoy.”
Braidwood, which is being represented by a legal team that includes the America First Legal Foundation, also urged the Supreme Court to take up the case.
The brief said the statute “is of immense importance,” and that the high court “should weigh in rather than leaving the constitutionality of [the law] and the appointments of the Task Force members to be resolved entirely by the court of appeals.”
Bursch said the justices are likely to focus on Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from 2020 during the oral argument on April 21.
In Seila Law, the court held that the structure of the bureau was unconstitutional because its director, who must be confirmed by the Senate, couldn’t be fired by the president at will, and this insulated the bureau from political accountability. The court held the agency could continue to exist under new rules that allowed the president to fire the director at will.
The legal issue here is whether the people making healthcare coverage decisions are “so independent that it becomes a constitutional delegation problem,” in which the officials can “go rogue and are able to do their own thing,” Bursch said.
The nondelegation doctrine holds that Congress may not delegate its legislative powers to other entities, including private organizations and administrative agencies.
The Alliance Defending Freedom filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the case on behalf of the Christian Employers Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for the rights of Christian employers to conduct businesses consistent with their religious beliefs. The alliance says that twice over the last two years, it has had to sue the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for “unilaterally trying to broaden federal statutes.”
The friend-of-the-court brief said that at first glance, the case “is about whether members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force are principal or inferior officers,” but it is actually about “whether officers of the United States, principal or inferior alike, can wield executive power independent from the President and so from the people.”
Task force members “must be accountable to [the president] who in turn is accountable to all of us. That’s our system. For executive power, the buck stops with the President,” it said.
Bursch said the government argues the statute makes the task force an independent committee that reports to the HHS secretary, but Braidwood Management’s position is that the law places the task force members outside the executive branch.
The question is whether the people who are making policies through the task force “have enough supervision and control over them [so] that they don’t become independent of the executive,” he said.
If, for example, Congress had written in the Affordable Care Act that the HHS secretary and president may not remove, replace, or reappoint members of the task force and that its policy recommendations may not be questioned by the president and secretary, “that would clearly be unconstitutional,” Bursch said.
The attorney said the current structure of the task force is “a hybrid” between this example, in which the president and secretary cannot review task force decisions, and the traditional federal agency, in which the president and secretary have “a lot of control.”
Braidwood Management’s position is that the task force members are principal officers because they weren’t appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
“The whole thing is unconstitutional,” he said.
Sam Dorman contributed to this report.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
