Move to defund Planned Parenthood under Trump administration signaled

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX and Tesla, along with former Presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, were recently tapped by President-Elect Donald Trump to head the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, a new Government agency tasked with reducing waste and spending. Now, it appears that defunding Planned Parenthood could be in their sights.

Musk and Ramaswamy specified in a recent op-ed published by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) that “We will serve as outside volunteers, not federal officials or employees. Unlike government commissions or advisory committees, we won’t just write reports or cut ribbons. We’ll cut costs,” adding, “The two of us will advise DOGE at every step to pursue three major kinds of reform: regulatory rescissions, administrative reductions and cost savings,” they wrote. “We will focus particularly on driving change through executive action based on existing legislation rather than by passing new laws. Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution, with a focus on two critical Supreme Court rulings issued during President Biden’s tenure.” These rulings appear to be West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency (2022) and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024).

“DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can, by executive action, immediately pause the enforcement of those regulations and initiate the process for review and rescission,” the duo also wrote, claiming they are “focused on delivering cost savings for taxpayers.”

Though Musk and Ramaswamy suggested that “[s]keptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone,” they took aim at a few specific funding recipients. “…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.”

Planned Parenthood is a political organization and an abortion corporation that portrays itself as a “health care” agency.

Planned Parenthood is abortion-focused, and taxpayers foot the bill

Planned Parenthood commits 40% of all abortions in the United States; even as its legitimate health services were in decline last year, Planned Parenthood broke its record and committed 392,715 abortions, according to its 2022-23 annual report, nearly 20,000 more abortions (a 5% increase) from the previous year. This is a 100% increase from the number of preborn children they killed in 2000. What this amounts to is 1,076 preborn children killed every day, nearly 45 every hour, and one every 80 seconds in 2022-23 — by Planned Parenthood alone.

Planned Parenthood Abortions, which have long been tethered to eugenics, now make up 40% of all abortions in the U.S.

In its most recently reported year, Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer dollars jumped over 4% from the previous year, up to nearly $700 million dollars reported for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023. In less than 25 years, taxpayer dollars to Planned Parenthood have climbed a whopping 245% (from $202.7M in 2000 to the most recent figure).

As of June 30, 2023, Planned Parenthood had accumulated over $2 BILLION in total revenue, with excess revenue hitting $178.6 million. Planned Parenthood’s net assets and liabilities have now sit at over $2.9 billion, the highest recorded in recent years.

The organization has committed over 7.1 million abortions and received nearly $10.7 billion from taxpayers since 2000 — and all in the face of complaints from staffers about discrimination, retaliation, abuse, and racism.

Planned Parenthood’s long list of infractions

Over the years, accusations of abuses, scandals, fraud, racism, pregnancy discrimination, privacy breaches, and Medicaid fraud have piled up against Planned Parenthood. Despite these claims, the U.S. government has continued to funnel millions in taxpayer dollars to the organization, which was founded upon the philosophy of eugenics.

These abuses include:

• Misleading women with false and deceptive marketing
• Overbilling and Medicaid fraud, patient privacy violations, and more
• Lying about the services it provides, including prenatal care
• Lying about providing mammograms
• Misinforming women about prenatal development
• Providing poor care for clients, with former managers accusing them of “treating women like cattle” and using ultrasounds only for abortions
• Failing to report child sexual abuse (a violation that alone should result in the organization losing millions of taxpayer dollars granted under Title X federal funds)
• Promoting BDSM and other disturbing sexual practices for teens
• Multiple campaign donation violations for which Planned Parenthood PACs and their appointed overseers have been cited by the Federal Election Commission
• Alleged discrimination against staffers
• Former staffers tied to sexual abuse

Failure to comply with mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse

Live Action investigations have documented Planned Parenthood’s willingness to aid sex traffickers, to commit sex-selective abortions, and more, which should disqualify Planned Parenthood from receiving federal funding.

Live Action’s Aiding Abusers investigative report and docuseries includes actual criminal cases and testimony from the attorney of two victims, exposing how Planned Parenthood covers up child sexual abuse. Live Action undercover investigative videos documented Planned Parenthood employees at 15 different facilities showing a willingness to cover up child sexual abuse and child sex trafficking.

An interview between Live Action president Lila Rose and a former Planned Parenthood manager revealed that instead of helping employees to identify and report potential abuse, the corporation’s training sessions instructed staff on how to identify undercover journalists and whether they were being recorded.

Shoddy ‘health care’

Lawsuits reveal that the quality of care provided is less than stellar. A lawsuit filed against Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, Inc. (PPSNE), a recipient of Title X funds, alleged a PPSNE midwife misdiagnosed a pregnancy that resulted in the death of a 22-week-old baby boy after telling the pregnant woman that she had miscarried at six weeks. Another alleges PPSNE failed to notice a client was 14 weeks pregnant before inserting an IUD. A third separate lawsuit alleges that a PPSNE abortionist left a woman permanently injured.

A separate lawsuit filed against Planned Parenthood Hudson Peconic (PPHP) accused the organization of miscalculating a woman’s pregnancy so egregiously that she painfully delivered a “fully formed” 30 to 36-week baby boy into a toilet after Planned Parenthood’s abortionist allegedly told the woman she was just six (6) weeks along, then prescribed her abortion pills.

Another lawsuit alleged that Planned Parenthood botched a client’s abortion and abandoned her afterwards, leaving her with weeks of pain and blood loss — and then, a premature delivery of her baby, who survived for an hour after birth though her mother was told she was stillborn.

Alleged Trafficking of Aborted Baby Body Parts

In 2015, Planned Parenthood was the subject of an undercover investigation by the Center for Medical Progress, which purported to show that some affiliates and employees of the corporation were participating in the trafficking of aborted body parts in violation of federal law.

As Live Action News previously noted:

In the Human Capital Project, pro-life investigators David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt of the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) went undercover for two years to expose Planned Parenthood’s trafficking in the body parts of aborted children. Though the tactics they used are common among investigative journalists (so much so that the U.S. Reporters’ Committee filed a friend of the Court submission in support of CMP, as they are a journalistic standard) Daleiden and Merritt have been forced into a years-long legal battle that has culminated in the two investigators — and others involved with CMP — being forced to pay millions to Planned Parenthood.

Editor’s Note: This post will be updated with more information.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]