House Speaker Mike Johnson says he ‘would like to’ defund Planned Parenthood
Rep. Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, said this week he hopes to defund Planned Parenthood once the new Trump administration is in place.
While appearing on Fox News’ “The Story with Martha MacCallum,” Johnson said the abortion giant will be defunded if Congress is willing to approve it. “I would like to. That’s for sure,” Johnson said, after MacCallum asked if he would be willing to revoke their taxpayer funding (along with funding for PBS).
However, he noted that it will ultimately come down to having the votes in Congress.
“We’ve got to build consensus to have the votes to do that,” he said. “Now, some of this will be done by executive order out of the White House. He has a broad authority to do a lot of that. But where Congress is involved, that’s where it takes the hard work of legislating and getting everybody on the same page. So there’ll be lots of ideas that come out. We don’t want to put too many of it out right now, okay, but this is part of that preparing the playbook to unleash and unroll in January.”
When asked if spending for both Planned Parenthood and PBS would have their spending axed, Speaker Mike Johnson says "I would like to, that's for sure."
Johnson pointed to a new regulatory agency being chaired by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is tasked with eliminating government waste. Both Musk and Ramaswamy recently signaled that they could be open to recommending that Planned Parenthood be defunded.
“DOGE will help end federal overspending by taking aim at the $500 billion plus in annual federal expenditures that are unauthorized by Congress or being used in ways that Congress never intended, from $535 million a year to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and $1.5 billion for grants to international organizations to nearly $300 million to progressive groups like Planned Parenthood,” they wrote in a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal.
Planned Parenthood commits 40% of all abortions in the United States, and the number of abortions it commits has steadily increased over the years – as has their taxpayer funding. Taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood have climbed 245% in the last 20 years, from $202.7M in 2000 to nearly $700 million reported for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023. Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood has recorded $2 billion in total revenue, with excess revenue of $178.6 million. Their net assets and liabilities are now over $2.9 billion, the highest recorded in recent years, signaling that there’s no reason for the abortion corporation to continue receiving so much government funding.
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