When then-Congressman Mike Pence first argued in 2007 that Planned Parenthood should be stripped of all federal funding, it was seen as a niche position held by only the most strident anti-abortion lawmakers. But heading into 2025 — almost two decades later — Republicans say defunding the organization is one of their earliest priorities of the 119th Congress.
In the aftermath of the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, Republicans have struggled to come up with a unified message and strategy around abortion. But with GOP control of the House, Senate and the White House, Rep. Kevin Hern, who will lead House Republicans’ Policy Committee next term, told NOTUS defunding Planned Parenthood is now a consensus position in the conference.
President-elect Donald Trump has said he’d veto a national abortion ban, arguing it should be left up to the states, leaving more limited options for anti-abortion advocates to advance their position legislatively. So Hern said “one of the biggest things” the conference can do is “checking on the funding of what we’re doing on the federal level for Planned Parenthood.”
Speaker Mike Johnson and incoming Senate Majority Leader John Thune have long supported stripping Planned Parenthood of federal funding. Trump allies in the administration are also declaring it to be a top priority. Republicans have already said they will use budget reconciliation — a process that requires only a simple majority in both chambers — to get certain legislation through.
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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, wrote in a recent op-ed that the advisory committee will be “taking aim” at the “nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood.”
“We’ve been here before — we are not new to shutdown and ‘defund’ fights. We fended off a number of these attacks during Trump’s first term — and Planned Parenthood health centers are still there serving millions of patients across the nation,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood’s president and CEO, in a statement in response to the Ramaswamy and Musk op-ed.
Pence was successful in 2011 when House Republicans attached the defunding to a spending bill, but it was ultimately stripped out of the legislation in the Senate. The Trump administration took matters into its own hands in 2019, issuing a regulation that banned any organization that gave referrals for abortions from receiving Title X Family Planning Program grants — which accounts for part of the federal funding Planned Parenthood receives. The Biden administration reversed these regulations, but it’s now all but guaranteed Trump will reinstate them when he returns to office. However, members of Congress believe they will be able to codify those regulations into law and go further by banning clinics from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.
Federal funding is already legally prohibited from being used to directly cover abortions except in the case of rape, incest or a threat to the pregnant person’s life. But given Planned Parenthood affiliates perform nearly 40% of all abortions in the United States, it remains a big target for the anti-abortion movement.
“I mean, public funding of abortion, majority of taxpayers don’t think we should be using taxpayer dollars on abortion,” said Rep. Andy Harris, co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus and chair of the House Freedom Caucus.
Rep. Kat Cammack told NOTUS that Trump, who has said the federal government should not be involved in abortion, would back it. She called Trump “the most pro-life president in my lifetime” and said she “cannot imagine a scenario where he does not defend those most vulnerable and just take a commonsense approach to where we’re using taxpayer dollars, and we all can agree that taxpayer dollars should not be used to fund abortions.”
A bicameral group of Republicans in Congress, led by Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Rep. Chris Smith, is seeking an updated figure on Planned Parenthood’s finances to help Congress as it “considers funding levels.” (The most recent figure provided by the government came in 2015, when the Congressional Research Service found that 43% of Planned Parenthood’s yearly revenue came from federal funds through Medicaid reimbursements and Title X grants.)
Project 2025, the transition project helmed by The Heritage Foundation composed of over 100 conservative organizations, demands that Congress prohibit Planned Parenthood from receiving Medicaid funds (over half of the group’s patients are on Medicaid) and that Health and Human Services reinstate Trump’s previous Title X regulation.
It is unclear what anti-abortion policies Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead HHS, would support given he has previously stated he supports Roe v. Wade protections, but some House Republicans say it doesn’t matter.
Ultimately, “the person that makes those decisions is the president of the United States,” said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart. Vice President-elect JD Vance has said that the administration was supportive of defunding Planned Parenthood.
Last year, Planned Parenthood reported that abortion represented only 4% of the services its health centers provided. Most of the services the organization offered were testing and treatment for sexually transmitted infections, contraception and cancer screenings and prevention. Cutting funding would be “catastrophic” for the organization’s ability to provide these other non-abortion services and would lead to a “national health care disaster,” said Gabby Richards, Planned Parenthood’s director of federal advocacy communications.
Planned Parenthood provides care “mostly in health professional shortage areas, rural, and medically underserved communities,” Richards said in a statement to NOTUS. “To put it simply, trying to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood means trying to take away access to essential health care for people in communities all over the country.”
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Oriana González is a reporter at NOTUS.
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