Tag Archive for: Taxpayer Funding

White House Rescissions Package Would Defund PBS Days after ‘Sesame Street’ Celebrates Pride Month

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The Trump administration has introduced a multibillion-dollar budget-cutting measure to free taxpayers from subsidizing far-left programs, including a provision to completely defund public broadcasting outlets just days after a PBS children’s show posted a social media message celebrating Pride Month.

The $9.4 billion rescissions package, delivered to Congress by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Tuesday, slashes programs conservatives have long denounced as wasteful, including $1.2 million in foreign aid projects promoting the LGBTQ+ lifestyle in such socially conservative regions as the Caribbean, the western Balkans, and Uganda. The White House says it also eliminates such wasteful or controversial programs as feeding insect powder to children in Africa.

One of every eight dollars cut by the proposal comes from public broadcasting. The rescissions package eliminates more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the parent of National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting System (PBS), which conservatives have long opposed due to its lack of constitutional authorization and overwhelmingly left-wing bias. Taxpayers furnished $535 million of the CPB’s $545 million annual revenue in fiscal year 2025. (The other $10 million came from estimated interest). The rescissions package cancels all CPB allocations for two years.

The proposed budget cut came just two days after the most beloved show on PBS, “Sesame Street,” posted a social media message celebrating the LGBTQ agenda on the first day of June, dubbed “Pride Month” by LGBT activists.

PBS Is ‘Grooming Children’ at Taxpayer Expense: Congressman

“On our street, everyone is welcome. Together, let’s build a world where every person and family feels loved and respected for who they are. Happy #PrideMonth!” exclaimed the social media account representing “Sesame Street” on Sunday. The accompanying graphic depicted the show’s Muppet characters linking arms to form a rainbow. The provocative post triggered widespread outrage.

“PBS is grooming children on American taxpayers’ dime. This is unacceptable. Congress must defund them and hold the executives accountable,” said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) Monday morning. “Nothing to see here: just a publicly funded puppet show promoting weird sex stuff to your three-year-old,” said Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire. Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, called the meme’s creators “[g]roomer freaks.” The Center for American Renewal, founded by OMB Director Russell Vought, cited the post as “further evidence that your tax dollars are funding propaganda for kids.”

While conservatives have documented public broadcasting’s liberal bias nearly since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, they say introducing gender confusion to toddlers is a new low. “They most certainly are trying to ‘normalize’ deviancy,” said radio talk show host Janet Parshall, sharing a video of the children’s characters featuring a flamboyant man on the HBO Max “Sesame Street” spin-off “The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo.” That program, which advertises itself as a “star-studded talk show for the whole family,” won a media award from the LGBTQ+ pressure group GLAAD in 2021.

“Is this the kind of ‘education’ PBS insists taxpayers must continue paying for?” asked the Heritage Foundation. “We must defund PBS and NPR immediately. No excuses GOP,” said Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.

Conservative members of Congress have heeded the call to enact the rescissions package’s cuts to these and other programs. “I’m looking forward to defunding NPR,” Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Tuesday.

Four out of 10 registered voters support cutting or eliminating taxpayer funding of NPR and PBS. “Pluralities of voters say that PBS (36%) and NPR (35%) are biased against Donald Trump and the Republicans,” reported the Napolitan News survey released last month.

NPR claims it “gets only about 1% of [its] funding from the federal government,” but critics say that accounting trick ignores fees the national headquarters charges local affiliates for carrying its nationally syndicated programming. CPB figures argue at the same time that they receive little taxpayer funding and that they cannot survive without it. “Rescinding these funds would devastate PBS,” said PBS CEO Paula Kerger.

Giving the CPB a zero budget would also be a step toward codifying President Trump’s executive orders. On May 1, he signed an executive order directing the CPB to “cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage.”

While House Republicans have introduced many bills to codify these executive orders permanently, few bills have reached the president’s desk. “We should be codifying EOs and passing rescissions by the hour — no weekends, no breaks, no vacations. We must pass ALL DOGE cuts!” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.). The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) announced that it has identified $180 billion in savings, or $1,118.01 for every U.S. taxpayer, so far. “We’re totally committed to making the DOGE cuts permanent,” pledged Trump in an Oval Office press conference with departing DOGE leader Elon Musk last Friday.

Conservatives also support the rest of the White House’s budget-cutting measures.

Rescissions Package Cuts USAID, LGBTQ, and Eat-the-Bugs Programs

The rescissions package released Tuesday also curtails controversial programs including international promotion of LGBTQ causes and programs to feed insects to children. OMB detailed numerous programs cut by the package, including:

  • $900 million from USAID;
  • $33,000 for “Being LGBTI in the Caribbean”;
  • $643,000 for LGBTQI+ programs in the Western Balkans;
  • $567,000 for LBGTQI+ programs in Uganda;
  • $833,000 for “transgender people, sex workers and their clients and sexual networks” in Nepal;
  • $5.1 million for “resilience of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans gender, intersex, and queer global movements”;
  • $3 million for circumcision, vasectomies, and condoms in Zambia;
  • $67,000 for testing insect powder nutrition on children in Madagascar;
  • $595,400 for training women in gender equity;
  • $500,000 for electric buses in Rwanda;
  • $6 million for “net zero cities” in Mexico; and
  • $135 million for the World Health Organization.

“I think it’s great to eliminate much of the funding of USAID,” Clyde told Perkins. “It’s ludicrous that we as American taxpayers are spending money on things like ‘Sesame Street’ in Iraq, or all these LGBTQ+ programs across the world. That is not anything that our taxpayers want their money spent on.”

This rescissions package “will be the first of many” legislative proposals to pare back spending, said Clyde — a promise made by the White House and confirmed by House leadership.

Pass Rescissions ‘Immediately’: House Conservatives

The conservative House Freedom Caucus called on House leadership to “immediately move this to the floor for swift passage,” as a demonstration the Republican Party will prove responsive to its own voters. “Passing this rescissions package will be an important demonstration of Congress’s willingness to deliver on DOGE and the Trump agenda. While the Swamp will inevitably attempt to slow and kill these cuts, there is no excuse for a Republican House not to advance the first DOGE rescissions package the same week it is presented to Congress then quickly send it for passage in the Republican Senate so President Trump can sign it into law.”

As of now, the date the House will vote on the package remains uncertain. “I would love to see it on the floor this week. I have not seen it on the schedule this week. But I heard that there’s a potential that it will be on the schedule for next week, and that would be fine, too,” Clyde told Perkins.

But Clyde explained moving the package through the House expeditiously may hold the key to its passage, final adoption, and the ability of Congress to deliver future rescissions packages. The cuts’ ratification “has to be done and be done quickly in order to maintain its privilege in the Senate, which means that it can bypass the Senate filibuster.” Under federal statute, both the House and Senate pass a rescissions package through an expedited process; in the Senate, debate is limited to 10 hours and both the motion to proceed to a vote and the final vote pass by a simple majority without the possibility of a filibuster.

Avoiding Democratic procedural stalling techniques “is absolutely critical, because I don’t think we’re going to get any rescissions done if we have to pass the Senate filibuster,” said Clyde. “Because it only requires 51 votes in the Senate, then we have to act on this very, very quickly. And I think that this week or next week would be sufficient. But it must be approved by the House and sent to the Senate so that the Senate can use its expedited procedures to approve it and send it back to the president for signature.”

Rescissions created by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C. 682-688) allow Congress to cut previous spending before its budgetary authority runs out, making it a powerful tool to cut back the nation’s budget deficit.

OMB Director Russell Vought has also raised the possibility the Trump administration will use impoundment, in which the president does not spend all the funds allotted by Congress, to reduce federal spending. “We may not actually have to get … Congress to pass the rescissions bills,” he said. “We have executive tools; we have impoundment.”

“Despite the modest size of President Trump’s rescission request, rescission packages can be valuable in helping policymakers eliminate unneeded and unused federal funding. Even rescissions for funding that would otherwise never be spent can prevent policymakers from later using the funds for new spending increases or tax cuts. While rescissions themselves can’t solve the nation’s fiscal challenges, they can be a step in the right direction to cut wasteful spending in the federal budget,” wrote Jordan Haring, director of fiscal policy at the American Action Forum.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: U.S. Taxpayers Must Fund Gender Transitions in Federal Prisons, per Judge

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

U.S. Government Lost $1 Trillion in COVID Relief Funds to Fraud

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The U.S. government loses nearly $1 trillion in emergency relief funds annually, according to experts. In a “60 Minutes” interview Monday night, Audient Group founder and former Government Accountability Office executive Linda Miller alleged that international crime rings defraud American taxpayers of billions of dollars every year.

“I believe the government is losing between $550 billion and about $750 billion a year — we’re coming up close to the $1 trillion amount — [that’s] lost every year to fraud,” Miller stated. She explained, “What we’re really talking about is nation-state actors, we’re talking about organized crime rings, we’re talking about using vast amounts of stolen American identities to monetize them for criminal activity.”

Fraud was rampant during the COVID-19 era, Miller explained. “I mean, it was like they threw money in the air and just let people run around and grab it. The most egregious part is that a lot of the people who stole that money were foreign, adversarial nation-states,” she said, estimating that over $1 trillion in COVID-19 relief funding was stolen through fraud.

However, she warned that security measures need to be increased even though the COVID-19 era has ended. “One of the things I found really disheartening is, since then, I’ve talked to some folks who said, ‘Well, that was just the pandemic. We don’t have to worry about it anymore.’ Was it? No,” Miller said. She added, “It’s whack-a-mole and these guys are paying close attention. They’re seeing where better controls are being put in place, and then they’re going to where the controls still haven’t been improved.”

Miller identified disaster relief funds as a top target for fraudsters. “When a disaster happens in the country, the fraud actors see where it’s coming, they look at the zip codes and they begin buying stolen identities so that they can begin applying for disaster loans, disaster grants on behalf of stolen identities,” she explained. FBI Cyber Division Assistant Director Bryan Vorndran confirmed, “All of our personally identifiable information — name, date of birth, former address, and social security number — is available on the dark net and can likely be purchased.”

Vorndran explained that much of the fraud being committed against the U.S. is sponsored by China and other nations hostile to America. He cited one case last year where the U.S. identified a $6 billion loss in COVID-era unemployment funds. The FBI agent confirmed that, unfortunately, “very little” of the money lost to fraud will ever be recovered. “These are arguably digital gangs in the 21st century that are built off of having safe haven status, meaning their governments are not going to interrupt their activity even if it’s illegal,” he said, pointing to foreign governments that sponsor or allow large-scale fraud operations in an effort to cripple the U.S. He added, “I believe that there are sustained campaigns across this globe that are very well resourced, with a goal of causing damage to the United States.”

Miller noted the fact that billionaire Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are doing more than other agencies have to combat and prevent fraud. “Elon Musk coming out and saying there is a huge amount of fraud — I welcome that message completely because finally someone is actually saying this,” she quipped. “When I watch DOGE today, I do see some hints that they are addressing the right issues,” she added. However, she advised the bloat-slashing agency not to conflate fraud with wasteful spending. “Fraud is willful deception,” Miller said.

She continued, “Often, you may not agree with what USAID does. You may not want to be investing American dollars in foreign fertilizer, for example. You may think that’s the wrong thing to be spending money on, but that’s not fraud.” She continued, “I really think fraud is not a political issue. This is mom and apple pie stuff, we all agree that bad actors should not be stealing American taxpayer dollars. … We see the adversary not as Republicans or Democrats, but as foreign adversarial nation states and organized crime rings.” Miller added, “I believe that there [are] opportunities for DOGE to save a lot of significant money if they focus on the right things, if they focus on real fraud.”

According to the Government Accountability Office and the FBI, up to $135 billion in unemployment insurance, at least $135 billion in economic injury disaster loans, and nearly $65 billion in paycheck protection program funds were stolen through fraud during the COVID-19 era. Thousands of individuals have been charged by the Department of Justice with fraud-related crimes over the past several years.

“I think it’s safe to say future historians will make entire careers on writing about the failures of the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” FRC Action Director Matt Carpenter told The Washington Stand. “More than five years removed from the start of the pandemic, we now know masking, closures, social distancing, and vaccinations did little to nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19. Now, we know the government’s prescription to prevent the economy from collapsing during COVID-19 not only did not work but led to the largest instance of fraud in American history, that we know of at least. We are a country $36 trillion in debt. We cannot afford to have a trillion dollars lost to fraud and abuse.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council,

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

PERKINS: For Congress, This Tick Tock Is Not about an App

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If you already battle high blood pressure, you may want to skip this next exercise. But for the rest of us, open a browser to USDebtClock.org and watch the neon-red digits spin faster than Reverend Al Sharpton when a TV camera blinks on. In the next few minutes, the display will rise by roughly $40 million, pushing the debt far beyond $36 trillion and accelerating toward $37 trillion. That’s more than $265,000 for every American household. And every added dollar is another chain of bondage for our children and grandchildren, a silent tax on their freedom and future.

Why the relentless rise? One reason is the waste, like that exposed last week by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. His report confirms that President Joe Biden’s 2021 withdrawal left the Taliban with 78 aircraft, 40,000 military vehicles, and more than 300,000 weapons — hardware American taxpayers bought for roughly $25 billion. Terrorists are now better armed than when we entered Afghanistan in 2001, funded with borrowed money

That was the Biden administration. Surely Republican leadership will reverse course — right? Not so fast. Keep your eye on that spinning debt clock.

Congress is assembling what the president calls the “one, big, beautiful bill,” a massive budget reconciliation package that needs only 51 Senate votes. Reconciliation is a rare chance to rein in spending and strip out policies that violate the GOP’s professed values —v alues that have grown hazy in the absence of a formal platform but still generally include protecting life, safeguarding children, and practicing fiscal restraint.

Yet about 20 House Republicans are threatening to torpedo the entire bill unless Planned Parenthood — the nation’s largest abortion business — continues to receive roughly $700 million a year in fresh taxpayer funding. Let that sink in: self-described pro-life lawmakers are ready to keep borrowing from your grandchildren to bankroll an organization that Congress has investigated for trafficking in baby body parts, an organization repeatedly accused of shielding sexual predators from justice.

With chemical-abortion pills now accounting for as many as two-thirds of all abortions, Planned Parenthood is eyeing its next profit center: cross-sex hormones and other so-called “gender-affirming” drugs — even for minors.

Do you really want your federal tax dollars underwriting permanent medical harm to confused children?

Here’s the bottom line: Planned Parenthood is not in the business of saving lives; it is in the business of ending or permanently altering them — about 400,000 last year alone. A Republican White House and a Republican-led Congress have zero moral or fiscal justification for sending one more dime its way.

So pray for courage — and then pick up the phone. Tell your representative to pass a reconciliation bill that cuts spending, protects the unborn, and refuses to subsidize Planned Parenthood. The debt clock is ticking, and so is the conscience of the nation.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Explainer: How Trump ’s Proposed 2026 Budget Impacts Transgenderism, Abortion, Education, Immigration, and More

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President Donald Trump won the 2024 election with a promise to end divisive, taxpayer-funded programs, and his proposed budget for the next fiscal year proves he is willing to save your money where his mouth is. The president’s budget specifically asks Congress to cut billions of dollars from government programs promoting “radical transgender ideology,” “LGBTQIA+” programs, and government “targeting [of] peaceful pro-life protesters” while transferring power back to the states and increasing federal funding for national defense, border security, and public safety.

President Trump detailed his proposed FY 2026 budget in a 46-page overview of major discretionary funding changes, revealing a fiscal and ideological break with his Democratic predecessors. In all, Trump would spend $1.69 trillion, including requesting more than $1 trillion in defense spending for the first time in U.S. history to assist in “repelling the invasion of our border” and “to clean up the mess President Trump inherited from the prior administration.”

Yet the White House refers to the spending guidelines as the “skinny budget,” since it offsets significant spending hikes with $136 billion in reductions that slash 22.6% from non-defense discretionary spending. “Savings come from eliminating radical diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory programs, Green New Scam funding, large swaths of the Federal Government weaponized against the American people, and moving programs that are better suited for States and localities to provide,” according to a White House fact sheet that accompanied the budget release.

If the Biden-Harris administration’s proposed FY 2025 budget sought to insert equity into every program through a whole-of-government approach, the second Trump administration has set out to uproot every vestige of compulsory taxpayer funding of the radical Left. “Over the last four years, Government spending aggressively turned against the American people and trillions of our dollars were used to fund cultural Marxism … and even our own invasion” by illegal immigrants, said Russ Vought, director of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB). “No agency was spared in the Left’s taxpayer-funded cultural revolution.” The administration cited $315 million the Biden administration spent on grant programs “to push ‘intersectionality,’ ‘racial equity,’ and LGBTQIA+ programming for preschoolers,” adding that the FY 2026 budget “ends all of that.”

The budget also promises to advance “the Administration’s goal of restoring federalism,” tying the well-being of families to the U.S. government’s respect for states’ rights and constitutional order. “Just as the Federal Government has intruded on matters best left to American families, it has intruded on matters best left to the levels of government closest to the people,” writes Vought in a letter transmitting the budget.

Here are the specific cuts and dollar amounts removed from the federal budget.

Abortion and the Right-to-Life Movement

President Trump’s proposed FY 2026 budget slashes or eliminates abortion funding while protecting pro-life advocates’ constitutional rights. Specifically, the budget would cut $6.2 billion from Global Health Programs and Family Planning initiatives. “The United States is the largest global contributor to programs that provide so-called family planning services through liberal NGOs, and have funded abortions. This stands in direct conflict with the President’s action reinstating the ‘Mexico City Policy.’ The Budget protects life and prevents a pro-abortion agenda from being promoted abroad with taxpayer dollars.” The president reinstated his 2017 Protecting Life in Global Health Assistance (PLGHA) policy, which bars any group that receives taxpayer funding from carrying out or advocating for abortion overseas. But the budget maintains funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) for current recipients.

The proposed budget also safeguards pro-life advocates’ rights by eliminating $545 million from Biden-Harris administration policies that charged the FBI with “targeting peaceful pro-life protesters, concerned parents at school board meetings, and citizens opposed to radical transgender ideology,” as well as erasing “DEI programs.” The budget also reestablishes fairness by cutting $193 million from General Legal Activities at the Justice Department, prioritizing criminal prosecutions but reducing the budget of the Civil Rights Division, “which the previous administration weaponized against States implementing election integrity measures, local police departments, and pro-life Americans.”

Slashing LGBTQ Radicalism and DEI Programs

President Trump made eliminating DEI, critical race theory, and government-sponsored racism and sexism a focus of his successful 2024 campaign, cementing the approach through a series of executive actions that prosecute race-based discrimination. Similarly, the Republican Party spent $65 million on ads highlighting the Democratic Party’s extremism on transgender ideology, making it the top reason swing voters decided not to vote for Kamala Harris, according to the Democratic polling firm Blueprint. The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts tens of billions of dollars in DEI and LGBTQIA+ funding, as well as climate change ideology.

The proposed budget cuts $18 billion from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to restore “accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH. NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health” by denying the likely lab leak origin of COVID-19 and promoting gain-of-function research, which the president recently banned by executive order. Yet “NIH has also promoted radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth. For example, the NIH funded a study titled ‘Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones,’ in which two participants tragically committed suicide,” the budget notes. The president also cuts $3.6 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in a blueprint that “eliminates duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary programs.”

The president would cut $8.3 billion from Economic Support Fund, Development Assistance for Europe, Eurasia, and Central Asia, as part of a broader foreign policy to place American interests first and save Europe from itself, but also because “U.S. economic and development aid has been funneled to radical, leftist priorities, including climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and LGBTQ activities around the world.”

The budget cuts $3.5 billion from the National Science Foundation’s grants and research on “climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences.” That comes in addition to another $1.1 billion cut to NSF’s Broadening Participation activities, which have underwritten such programs as “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM”; “addressing White Supremacy in the STEM profession”; and preparing “the next generation of DEI leaders to promote long-term, sustainable racial equity initiatives.”

The president moved dramatically against the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) after taking office: exposing their radical grants before firing most of their staff and placing the agency under the authority of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The FY 2026 budget cuts $2.5 billion from USAID and “eliminates non-essential staff that were hired based on DEI and preferencing practices” while implementing executive orders 14169 to realign foreign aid and 14151 to eliminate DEI programs.

The budget cuts more than $1 billion in grants nestled under the Department of Justice, such as “$1 million to the National Opinion Research Center to ‘investigate the social ecological context of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crime reporting.’ Further, the Budget realigns Violence Against Women Act funding with its original core mission to combat violence against women and directly serve victims — eliminating extraneous programs that divert resources from these core functions. For example, grant funding from the Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) had been offered for biological men. In addition, OVW’s Rural Program grants were sent to train community-based Fa’afafine advocates — an organization of biological men that describes themselves as a ‘third-gender.’”

Pro-family experts singled out the VAWA proposal as a welcome gesture. “VAWA programs are intended to help women who are the victims of abuse and in recent years it has been invaded by gender ideology. Currently, women who escape abuse in a VAWA funded shelter could be forced to share private spaces with a man,” Mary Beth Waddell, director of Federal Affairs for Family and Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “We are grateful that the president is calling out this injustice.”

The budget cuts $4.5 billion from the Department of Education while maintaining full federal funding for K-12 schools, consolidating 18 programs into one formula grant that allows the DOE to do as much work with fewer employees. “The new approach allows States and districts to focus on the core subjects — math, reading, science, and history — without the distractions of DEI and weaponization from the previous administration,” notes the budget. It also saves $127 million in administrative costs.

At the college level, the budget cuts $195 million from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Ed (FIPSE), noting that Congress has “abused FIPSE by using it to fund initiatives unrelated to students or institutional reforms, including earmarking $1.2 million for San Diego Community College’s LGBTQIA+ PRIDE Center staffing.” It also cuts $1.6 billion from TRIO and GEAR UP, two programs that incentivized colleges to engage low-income students. The administration argues that economic incentives have eliminated the need for the federal government to continue underwriting colleges and universities’ outreach. “A renewed focus on academics and scholastic accomplishment by [Institutions of Higher Education], rather than engaging in woke ideology with Federal taxpayer subsidies, would be a welcome change for students and the future of the Nation.” The budget also removes $691 million in cultural exchanges for foreign exchange students that prevent American students from acquiring high-demand skills, which the foreign students then take back to their home countries.

The budget cuts $1.6 billion by consolidating the Labor Department’s Make America Skilled Again (MASA) grants, defunding nonprofits promoting DEI, and “the hiring of illegal aliens and migrants; sometimes providing them subsidized housing in addition to a job.”

It cuts $1.3 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), scrutinizing NOAA grants for “George Mason University’s ‘Policy Experience in Equity Climate and Health’ fellowship, a workshop for ‘transgender women, and those who identify as nonbinary.’”

Trump’s budget cuts $646 million from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s non-disaster grant programs, seeking to curtail such FEMA activities as “webinars promoting the distribution of disaster aid based on ‘intersectional’ factors like sexual orientation and prioritizing ‘investment in diversity and inclusion efforts … and multicultural training’ over disaster prevention and response.” Under the Trump administration, “FEMA will no longer ‘instill equity as a foundation of emergency management.’” The document rightly notes that “FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the President in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated.”

The budget cuts $624 million from the Economic Development Administration (EDA) and Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), specifically citing an EDA grant “constructing a ‘Pride Plaza’ in Portland, Oregon.”

It cuts $602 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), effectively eliminating “wasteful, woke programming in NIFA, such as activities related to climate change, renewable energy, and promoting DEI in education that were prioritized under the Biden Administration.”

The Trump administration aims to gut federally funded woke programs aimed at Americans at both ends of life. The proposed FY 2026 budget eliminates $405 million from the Labor Department’s Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP), which is supposed to subsidize jobs and employment for poor senior citizens but “is effectively an earmark to leftist, DEI-promoting entities like the National Urban League, the Center for Workforce Inclusion, and Easter Seals.” At the same time, it cuts $315 million from Preschool Development Grants (PDG), which was “weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to extend the Federal reach and push DEI policies on to toddlers.” For instance, the “guiding principles” implemented by the Minnesota Department of Education for its PDG program include “intersectionality” and “racial equity.”

The budget cuts roughly $19 billion from programs promoting what the White House calls the “Green New Scam.”

The government’s proposed budget generally reins in government grants flowing to radical causes:

  • It cuts $167 million by consolidating the Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneurial Development Programs (EDP), deleting such programs as SCORE, “which in 2023 posted ‘Six Ways to Support LGBTQIA-Owned Businesses.’”
  • It cuts $129 million from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which “pushed radical gender ideology onto children, funding a project at the Seattle Children’s Hospital titled, ‘Using Telehealth to Improve Access to Gender-Affirming Care for BIPOC and Rural Gender-Diverse Youth.’”
  • It cuts $112 million from programs aimed at “Strengthening Institutions,” noting, “It is not the responsibility of Federal taxpayers to support a new ‘Guided Pathways Village, expanding the current Learning Communities and creating a new Ethnic and Pride Inclusion Center for historically underserved students, including LGBTQ+ students.’”
  • It cuts $100 million in “divisive racial discrimination and environmental justice grants that were destined to go to organizations that advance radical ideologies.”
  • It cuts $70 million from Teacher Quality Partnerships, which field grants indoctrinating teachers to begin “acknowledging and responding to systemic forms of oppression and inequity, including racism, ableism, ‘gender-based’ discrimination, homophobia, and ageism.”
  • It cuts $55 million from Complex Crisis Fund, “a catch-all slush fund for nation-building projects and political interference” which “has been weaponized to mandate DEI and LGBTQ policies be implemented in recipient countries as a condition of aid to small businesses.”
  • It cuts $49 million from the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights, a 35% strategic reduction to “refocus away from DEI and Title IX transgender cases … while removing their ability to push DEI programs and promote radical transgender ideology.”

The proposed FY 2026 budget also cuts a total of $19.2 billion from Energy Department initiatives it describes as part of the “Green New Scam.”

Getting the Government Out of the ‘Disinformation’ Business

The proposed FY 2026 budget cuts $491 million from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) as part of its efforts to eliminate “weaponization and waste.” The budget “eliminates programs focused on so-called misinformation and propaganda as well as external engagement offices such as international affairs. These programs and offices were used as a hub in the Censorship Industrial Complex to violate the First Amendment.”

It also cuts $315 million for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which supported Ukrainian government efforts to brand critics as exponents of Russian disinformation and “funded the now-infamous Disinformation Index Foundation that targeted and blacklisted conservative media outlets like Federalist, Newsmax, TAC, the Blaze,” and others.

Restoring National Sovereignty

President Trump has identified himself with the words “America First,” and his budget stakes out similar priorities. It cuts $1.7 billion from the United Nations, UNESCO, and World Health Organization dues, implementing executive order 14199. However, the president may fund these organizations out of a separate funding source “to preserve maximum negotiating leverage.” It also eliminates $1.6 billion from United Nations “peacekeeping” missions that wage war under the U.N.’s blue-helmeted auspices. And it cuts $1.5 billion from Food for Peace, recognizing the waste and abuse of foreign aid transfers from U.S. taxpayers to foreign oligarchs.

The budget also acknowledges that the free market and local business development create sustainable prosperity, not foreign aid. “The program also distorts and undermines local and regional markets where the aid often could be purchased for less and with less waste,” says the budget. Similarly, it cuts $75 million from Transition Initiatives, a program that leads to “further destabilization” around the world and “funds a wasteful tangle of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and partisan cutouts pushing a leftist agenda around the world.”

Borders, Patriotism, National Unity

The budget increases funding for the Department of Homeland Security — which oversees many border enforcement and deportation efforts — by a whopping 65%, or $43.8 billion in additional funds. It cuts nearly $2 billion from programs for refugees and Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs), funds which “were weaponized by the Biden-Harris Administration to give cash handouts, medical services, and job training to illegal immigrants” and to release children in the custody of “insufficiently vetted sponsors,” effectively making the government complicit in child trafficking.

It cuts $650 million from the Shelter and Services Program earmarked for “non-citizen migrants,” tax payments which “funded radical leftist NGOs, who spent funding to facilitate mass illegal migration into the interior of the Nation … weakening the United States from within, taking resources away from American citizens, and promoting crime and decay in America’s cities.” And it cuts $247 million from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which the Biden administration used “to facilitate mass illegal migration by allowing illegal migrants to fly into the interior without proper documentation.”

Yet the budget radically increases funding for the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) to hire more air traffic controllers; for Rail Safety and Infrastructure grants to prevent tragedies such as the train derailment and intentional detonation of a train in East Palestine, Ohio; for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) to intercept fentanyl; and for stronger trade enforcement against technological and competitiveness threats from the People’s Republic of China.

“Linking proposed decreases in funding to areas of egregious mismanagement of taxpayer dollars and reorienting these dollars to their intended purpose, as opposed to ideological ones, sends a strong message that taxpayers deserve respect, and the use of their hard-earned money should be stewarded well,” Waddell told TWS.

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

DOGE Employees Work Around-the-Clock to Save American Taxpayers Billions of Dollars

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Last week, the man behind the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Elon Musk, invited Fox News’s Jesse Waters to attend his team’s weekly board meeting. Just as Bret Baier’s previous March interview with Musk and part of the DOGE team had been, this meeting was eye-opening — revealing specific, appalling cases of government agencies’ waste, fraud, and abuse of millions in taxpayer dollars. In addition, this meeting revealed a number of young, college-aged DOGE employees who view their around-the-clock work to be their patriotic duty — helping the United States become financially stable for decades to come.

One Employee Dropped Out of Harvard to Help Save America’s Economy

Yet while they selflessly serve, they receive threats (Musk has also received death threats, and Teslas having been set on fire, smashed, and vandalized). One young DOGE team member told Waters:

“Many of … us have … gotten hate mail threats from reporters and the public alike. I think, you know, speaking for myself — I dropped out of Harvard and came here to serve my country, and it’s been unfortunate to see, you know, lost friendships. … Most of campus hates me now. But I think fundamentally, I hope people realize through conversations like this that reform is genuinely needed. And if … there’s one group of people who really have a shot of success it’s the people here. You know, they’re up until 2:00 a.m. Monday through Sunday. DOGE does not recognize weekends. We’re working all the time.”

When Waters asked him what inspired him to drop out of Harvard, he responded, “There’s a lot of reform that’s needed. I think the value of this and the impact here is so much more vast than anything you could learn in a classroom, doing computer science.”

Waters replied, “And you guys are sleeping here? I’m hearing you guys are up all night? You have this meeting at 10:00 p.m. every Wednesday?”

He replied, “We’ll probably … go back to work right after this, yeah.”

So far, DOGE estimates they have saved the country $165 billion, which is $1,024.84 per taxpayer.

DOE Employees Used $4 Billion COVID Fund for Parties at Caesar’s Palace, Stadiums

At their weekly meetings, Musk asks each team leader to give a report on how their team is doing. The first team member gave an incredible example right off the bat. He explained, “When a payment is made (and the computer of the Treasury pays about $5 trillion per year, crazy amounts), there was formally not a budget code on there. A payment was made, you did not know what it was for. It could have been for anything.”

He went on to explain, “There was a $4 billion COVID fund in the Department of Education. There was no receipt required, so people could just draw down on it. When people looked into it before us, they found that money was being used to rent out Caesar’s Palace for parties, rent out stadiums, etc. So the one change that we made is we had the simple requirement that if you draw down money, you must first upload a receipt. … Upon doing so, nobody drew down money anymore.”

Another Fraud Discovery? ‘Just Another Day at the Office’

Sadly, this is just one of numerous examples of government waste or fraud. Waters asked, “When you find these things, do you guys get mad? Are you like, ‘Yes, I got one!?’ How does it make you feel?”

One of the DOGE team leaders answered, “It’s so common. You get numb to it.”

Musk agreed, saying, “Unfortunately, the hundredth time you’ve heard it, it’s hard not to get a little numb. By the 200th time, you’re like, ‘Well okay, it’s just another day at the office.’”

‘Institute of Peace’ Had Loaded Guns, Spent Taxpayer Money on Private Jets, Had $130,000 Contract with Former Taliban Member

Another DOGE employee gave an example of where they encountered a “battle” with government agency employees. He explained, “We went into the agency and found they had loaded guns inside their headquarters. Kind of the opposite of the title — by far the least peaceful agency we’ve worked with, ironically. Additionally, we found that they were spending money on things like private jets, and they even had a $130,000 contract with a former member of the Taliban.”

He went on to describe:

“Just a few hours after we got into their headquarters, we found their chief accountant had deleted over a terabyte of accounting records. You would have to ask, ‘Why would somebody do that?’ We were able to recover that from a few great employees at the Institute of Peace. And I think the most troubling thing was, they received $55 million a year from Congress, and any money that went unspent — instead of returning it to Congress — they would sweep it into a private bank account which has no Congressional oversight, and that’s what they would use to fund events at their headquarters on the private jets.”

DOGE has referred this case to the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Good, Hardworking Government Employees Are Thankful for DOGE and Helping Them to End Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Waters asked the DOGE team if there are good people that come up to them and thank them for what they are doing.

An employee enthusiastically responded, saying, “Absolutely! There are people in the State Department that will stop you — or all of the agencies that we’ve been to — that’ll stop you in the hallways or write emails and say, ‘I was scared to write this,’ or ‘I don’t know if you’re interested in this.’ But they usually have great ideas, and … they often have the best ideas because they’ve worked in the places, and they’ve been stifled by the bureaucracy for so many years. So one of the great things, that, at least in my experience … we listen to them and empower them.”

Musk wholeheartedly agreed and added, “So, yes, in fact I’d like to emphasize that because we’d like to just give a big ‘thank you’ to all the government employees who are helping reduce the waste and fraud because … we really couldn’t do it without you. So it’s a group effort.”

Another employee affirmed that DOGE employees are supportive of the agencies that they are working in and that they could not do their work without the help of hardworking government employees. He said:

“We are encountering droves of government employees who are missionaries, not mercenaries, who are actually here serving because they believe in what they’re doing. They want to do things well. We are trying to empower them, and they feel empowered now to ask the question of ‘Why aren’t we doing this? What else can we be doing? How can we fix this?’ And I think agency by agency, it is filled with exceptional government employees, and when we give them the tools, when we give them the systems, and we leave behind systems to help them do their jobs better, that’s the permanent change, and they’re embracing that not because it’s new to them. It’s because it’s something they’ve always wanted to do, but for the first time ever we’re giving them the tools and the collaboration to be able do that.”

Waters responded, “It’s a very important message. That message needs to get out a lot more. I’m so glad you said that.”

The employee added, “We have exceptional people at all of our agencies. Exceptional. I mean, they do a thankless job, and they work incredibly hard.”

AUTHOR

Kathy Athearn

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

DOGE Exposes Millions in Blue-State Unemployment Fraud

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The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has revealed that it has found close to $400 million worth of fraudulent unemployment claims that have been paid out by the federal government since 2020. The revelation comes as the overall cost-cutting goals of the Trump administration initiative have become much more modest, but experts say that the effort is still vitally important in order to help reverse the trend of massive federal deficits year after year.

In a post on X last week, DOGE announced that it had uncovered over 24,000 claims from people purporting to be over 115 years old, for a total of $59 million in unemployment benefits. Another 28,000 people between the ages of one and five claimed $254 million, and another 9,700 people “with birth dates over 15 years in the future” claimed $69 million. “In one case,” DOGE reported, “someone with a birthday in 2154 claimed $41k.”

In a follow-up post on April 10, DOGE noted that “California, New York, and Massachusetts accounted for most of these improper claims, totaling $305M in unemployment benefits. Additionally, California accounted for 68% of the unemployment benefits paid to parolees identified by CBP on the terrorist watchlist or with criminal records.”

Notably, the three states are almost entirely controlled by the Democratic Party, with the governorship and both state legislative chambers led by Democrats in all three states. “There’s a reason for the mass exodus from Democrat-run states that have mismanaged their economies and driven residents to the nearest Republican-led state,” White House spokesperson Harrison Fields told Fox News. “High taxes, poor stewardship of taxpayer dollars and progressive policies continue to yield negative results, which is why Americans overwhelmingly support the work of DOGE.”

A February poll indeed showed that over three-quarters of Americans supported the work of DOGE. But by March, polls showed that enthusiasm for the cost-cutting efforts had cooled off substantially, with 47% saying they had a negative view of the Elon Musk-led effort and 41% saying they had a positive view of it. Still, the polls indicated that a majority of Americans support the idea that the federal government should be downsized.

This widely popular sentiment helped energize DOGE’s initial flurry of activity after President Trump’s inauguration in January, with Musk predicting that the department could start cutting roughly $4 billion per day in order to reach the goal of $1 trillion in cuts by the end of the current fiscal year on September 30. But over the weekend, The New York Times reported that Musk predicted during a Cabinet meeting on April 10 that DOGE’s cuts would only total about $150 billion by September, 85% less than their original goal.

Nevertheless, DOGE has uncovered a significant amount of fraud that has eaten up millions of taxpayer dollars in addition to the false unemployment claims. Last week, the department revealed that under the Biden administration, almost four million noncitizens were assigned Social Security numbers, with 1.3 million of those individuals receiving Medicaid benefits.

In wide-ranging comments to The Washington Stand, Quena González, senior director of Government Affairs at Family Research Council, expressed great appreciation for the effort that DOGE is undertaking.

“DOGE is to be commended for scrutinizing the scope and size of government to look for waste, fraud, and abuse,” he remarked. “No administration has attempted to move at the speed and scale with which President Trump has.”

“Cutting government waste is always difficult, for three principal reasons,” he explained. “First, no government entity voluntarily resigns; government bureaucracies, by definition, are self-perpetuating. As President Ronald Reagan said, ‘No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!’”

González continued, “Second, when the government starts spending taxpayer money on something, a whole cottage industry springs up around facilitating that government funding, lobbying to make sure that taxpayer dollars continue to flow, and coaching the recipients to continue to request and receive more and more funding every year. Quoting Reagan again, ‘The first rule of a bureaucracy is to protect the bureaucracy.’ Third, those who would discipline government spending have to locate and stop the actual funding streams that have been set up. This is technical work that takes time and often requires congressional action in order to be effective.”

González went on to acknowledge that DOGE has had some missteps and will likely commit more in the future. “Cutting government spending of taxpayer dollars will meet so many entrenched interests that to be successful DOGE has had to move very, very quickly and at times act bluntly,” he noted. “Disciplining the size and scope of government is probably the fastest way to create political enemies in Washington. President Trump understands this; remember, this ain’t his first rodeo, and he saw how the entrenched interests in Washington blocked his efforts to ‘drain the swamp’ during his first administration.”

González concluded by applauding DOGE for its efforts to end taxpayer-funded abortion. “Christians, in particular, should cheer the fact that, from the very beginning, DOGE put taxpayer funding for abortion providers in its sights, and now it appears Congress may follow suit by defunding big abortion in the budget reconciliation process, making DOGE’s aspirations statutory.”

“Let’s not lose sight of what a reasonable goal this is,” he contended. “Taxpayers should never have been forced to subsidize big abortion in the first place; Planned Parenthood alone receives nearly $700 million a year from taxpayers, then raises and spends tens of millions of dollars — nearly $70 million in the past presidential election alone — painting even the most benign pro-life protections as ‘extreme.’ If Planned Parenthood and its ilk want to not only snuff out a million unborn lives a year, then turn around and tithe to the politics of Molech, they should at the very least be required to do their blood-soaked work on their own dime and stop forcing pro-life taxpayers to participate.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

10 Beautiful Bills for a Better America

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As Congress debates major issues regarding taxes, tariffs, and trade, it would be heartening for faith, family, and freedom Americans if it found time to pass topical bills that address other pressing concerns such as protecting unborn life, dismantling taxpayer-funded abortion, conscience protections, and more.

A number of these measures have been introduced in diverse forms in past Congresses indisposed to adopt them. Others are ideas whose time had not yet come. But in these still-early days of the 119th Congress, the two chambers of Congress, one of which had time for Senator Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) around-the-clock oration, might well find room on their schedules to debate measures that accommodate conscience, support mothers and families, and protect an underappreciated national responsibility — the collection and analysis of social metrics.

Here are 10 measures that fit this general description, with the acknowledgement that they are only a sample of proposals that are within striking distance of adoption and worthy of congressional attention even in a crowded calendar.

Hawley Child Tax Credit Expansion

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) champions an expansion of the child tax credit, a longtime bipartisan proposition, to $5,000 from its current value of $2,000 per child. The credit would reportedly be refundable against payroll taxes, be available during the year in which the child was conceived, and be paid out over the course of the year rather than remitted as a lump sum at tax time.

S. 4524, Lankford Conscience Protection Act of 2024

Reintroduced most recently in June 2024, legislation like this is urgently needed in an environment where existing federal conscience protections languished unenforced in the Biden years, and states like Illinois and Washington are moving to require physicians or pregnancy centers to refer for abortions against their convictions that these actions are morally and ethically wrong. S. 4524 would have reinforced several existing federal conscience laws and grant individuals and institutions a private right of action to assert their conscience claims in federal court. The proposed law would clarify that the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must investigate alleged conscience violations and can suspend federal funds for health-related services if the violators do not respect conscience.

H.R. 796, Miller Second Chance for Moms Act

Introduced on January 28, 2025 by Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.), this legislation would amend the basic federal food, drug, and cosmetics legislation to require the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to mandate a warning label be placed on the abortion drug mifepristone. The warning label would advise women of the availability of an abortion pill reversal (APR) protocol that can often rescue their baby after the woman has taken the drug. It would require the secretary of HHS to create or contract with a 24/7, toll-free hotline to advise women on how to access abortion pill reversal with referrals limited solely to providers of APR.

H.R. 7, Smith No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion and Abortion Insurance Full Disclosure Act of 2025

Introduced on January 22, 2025, Rep. Christopher Smith’s (R-N.J.) bill is an expanded version of previous anti-funding measures and now has 81 House of Representatives co-sponsors. The bill would make permanent the terms of the Hyde Amendment, which permits funding of abortion only in cases of rape, incest, or where a physical disorder, injury, or illness would threaten a woman’s life. It would apply to the full sweep of Hyde Amendment provisions applicable now to annual spending bills. H.R. 7 would also bar federal subsidies for the portion of health insurance premiums that pay for abortion coverage.

H.R. 271 and 272, Fischbach Defund Planned Parenthood and Protecting Life and Taxpayers Acts

These measures, introduced on January 14, 2025, would prohibit Planned Parenthood from accessing any discretionary or mandatory federal funds because of its immersion in the provision and promotion of abortion. The Protecting Life Act would require all federally-funded entities to certify that they will not carry out abortions or provide funds to any other entity that carries out abortions beyond the terms permitted by the Hyde Amendment. The Senate version of the Defund Planned Parenthood Act, S. 203, was introduced on January 23, 2025 by Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and has 11 co-sponsors. In addition, a coalition of 150 pro-life groups has called on Congress to cut funding for Planned Parenthood in the upcoming budget reconciliation bill.

S. 334, Risch American Values Act

This bill carries forward pro-life foreign assistance policy. Introduced on January 30, 2025 by Senator James Risch (R-Idaho), the bill would amend the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 to ensure that no appropriated funds may be used to pay for abortion as a method of family planning or to motivate or coerce any person to be sterilized. The bill would also bar the use of funds to pay for biomedical research related to techniques of induced abortion or coerced sterilization. The bill has a dozen co-sponsors.

H.R. 627/S. 178, Norman-Ernst Ensuring Accurate and Complete Abortion Data Reporting Act of 2025

Introduced by Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) on the House side and Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in the Senate, this is a critical piece of legislation that will ensure the demographic and some health implications of induced abortion are tracked and analyzable to the extent possible in a national, public framework. The urgency of this legislation, which would redress a half century of voluntary and incomplete national reporting, is all the greater thanks to the rapid expansion of chemical abortion conducted with little to no medical evaluation or supervision. The bill notes the disturbing facts that not a single data point regarding abortion is publicly available for all 50 states, and that three states, constituting 15% of U.S. abortion volume, share no reports at all with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

H.R. 578, Roy FACE Act Repeal Act of 2025

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) has led the fight against the much-abused Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a law that was weaponized during the Biden administration to target right-to-life demonstrators with vindictive prosecutions and harsh penalties. President Trump, as one of his initial executive actions, pardoned men and women, including grandmothers, who had been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for engaging in protests, while making little or no progress in identifying or prosecuting individuals who attacked churches and pregnancy help centers. Absent repeal of this legislation, Roy says, biased enforcement will promptly resume in a future administration. “Data my office obtained from Merrick Garland’s DOJ showed that 97% of FACE Act prosecutions from 1994-2024 were against pro-life Americans.”

H.R. 722, Burlison, Life at Conception Act

The United States has seen a recent spike in abortions, beginning before the 2022 Dobbs ruling but continuing in its wake, with one source reporting that our nation’s abortion toll has risen to more than one million abortions per year. As Congress and the states look for ways to support mothers, the fact remains that for much of the country, the legal status of the unborn is a void that must be filled. It is lawful in much of the land to dismember a child in the womb; to destroy a child in the third trimester or a human embryo because it is affected by Down syndrome or is not the preferred sex; to set aside a child born alive and deny him or her life-saving care; to use public funds to pay for and promote abortion; to leave a woman alone in a bathroom to expel the new life from her womb; or to ship abortion drugs across state lines with little or no medical support.

To address these wrongs, legislation is needed that not only delivers unprecedented levels of support for men and women to act for the good of their child, but to safeguard each and every innocent life. The Life at Conception Act, with 73 co-sponsors, faces a steep challenge in this Congress but it too would be a beautiful bill, one with the added virtue of honoring our best hope for a better future for America.

AUTHOR

Chuck Donovan

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

PERKINS: Taxpayer Funds Should Respect the Will of the People

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A House DOGE subcommittee put a magnifying glass to NPR and PBS, funded in part with federal tax dollars through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The most recent budget shows that the two left-leaning media outlets rake in just shy of $550 million a year from taxpayers.

DOGE’s triad is waste, fraud, and abuse. An obvious issue lawmakers are debating in this age of multi-media — and our unprecedented $36 trillion of national debt — is whether the government’s funding of these broadcasts is a waste of taxpayer dollars. That’s a legitimate question. Add to that concern the abuse of left-leaning viewpoints, like NPR’s promotion of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts and the fact that there isn’t a single identified Republican working at NPR at the national level, and you can understand the growing concerns about the abuse of taxpayer dollars.

In addition to direct funding, NPR and PBS also enjoy various federal carve-outs that give them competitive advantages over other news providers. Many believe the government should keep its thumb off the First Amendment’s scale and force NPR and PBS to stand on their own — free of federal subsidies.

Yet, the starkest example of waste, fraud, and abuse may be found in the abortion industry — particularly at Planned Parenthood, which surpasses NPR and PBS in the scope of public funding and controversy.

Let’s Talk about Waste:

  • After the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Planned Parenthood reportedly raised nearly $500 million. Instead of using that money for health care services at their clinics, which the group claims is their priority, much of it went toward the organization’s political and legal interests.
  • Meanwhile, $699 million in taxpayer funds supported their clinics, where patient numbers have been steadily declining even as abortion procedures have risen.
  • According to The New York Times, Planned Parenthood has spent millions on CEO salaries, such as their national president, Alexis Johnson, whose annual salary in 2023 was $904,000. At the same time, very little funding was allocated to staff training — leading to incidents such as botched IUD placements and abortions.
  • I’m not alone in insisting that taxpayers shouldn’t be bankrolling the million-dollar salary of the CEO who heads the nation’s largest baby-killing operation. Even after the abortion lobby spent hundreds of millions of dollars after Roe fell, 60% of Americans still oppose taxpayer funding of abortion.

Let’s Talk Fraud:

  • Planned Parenthood has repeatedly faced allegations of trafficking fetal tissue — “baby body parts” — for profit.
  • There are also multiple reports suggesting Planned Parenthood has covered up criminal behavior and sexual abuse involving the very women it claims to serve.

Abuse?

  • The organization is increasingly pivoting toward so-called “gender-affirming” hormone therapy, including for minors — something many states are trying to prevent for their young residents.
  • Ultimately, it’s an abuse of taxpayer dollars to subsidize an entity involved in taking the lives of 400,000 unborn Americans.

Here is the bottom line: Our leaders should foster true neutrality in public funding and respect the will of citizens who object to financing controversial practices. It’s time to end all government funding for organizations like Planned Parenthood that are killing America’s opportunity to be great again.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

PERKINS: Military Should Be Defined by Effectiveness, Not Ideology

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Last week, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, halted President Trump’s policy that prohibits transgender individuals from serving in the military. To understand the significance of this ruling, we need to look at the policy’s origins and the reasons behind it.

Transgender-identifying individuals were never allowed to serve in the military until former President Obama changed the policy during the final days of his administration. Upon taking office in 2017, President Trump reversed that decision, citing multiple factors, including cost and military readiness.

According to an analysis by Family Research Council, which informed the 2017 policy decision, the projected cost of allowing transgender individuals to serve — which was before active recruitment began under the Biden administration — was estimated at $1.88 billion over 10 years. It’s even more now. This staggering price tag reflects taxpayer dollars that would have been used for medical treatments like hormone therapy and surgeries, along with the cost of lost service time because of the treatments.

To put that in perspective, those funds could purchase 22 F-35 fighter jets, 116 Chinook Helicopters, 3,700 Tomahawk missiles, or a Navy destroyer instead. President Trump made the right decision in 2017, and he made the right decision to reinstate the policy.

The military’s mission is clear, as the president wrote in his executive order: “to protect the American people and our homeland as the world’s most lethal and effective fighting force. This objective should not be compromised to accommodate political agendas or ideologies. … Military service must be reserved for those who are both mentally and physically fit to serve.”

Judge Reyes, in her 79-page ruling, called the Trump policy “unabashedly demeaning” and claimed it was “soaked in animus.” Using twisted logic at best, she argued that it is sex discrimination to prohibit transgenderism, because “a biological female who identifies as a woman is not banned.” That’s precisely the point. Women can serve, and men can serve, but not men who think they are women. Keep in mind the military routinely excludes individuals based on factors that affect readiness, such as excessive body fat, pregnancy, endometriosis, or even motion sickness. These exclusions are not acts of discrimination — they are practical measures to ensure mission preparedness.

Judge Reyes may want to reconsider her interpretation of presidential authority. The Constitution, in Article II, explicitly designates the president as the commander in chief of the Armed Forces. As former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in 2022, “Judges are not given the task of running the military.” That responsibility falls to the president, whose primary duty is to ensure the safety and security of the nation.

It’s also worth noting that Judge Reyes criticized the lack of studies to support the Trump administration’s policy reversal, while ignoring the fact that the Biden administration conducted no studies when it overturned Trump’s policy on the fifth day of his presidency.

President Trump is right, and Judge Reyes is wrong. Military policy should be driven by effectiveness and national security — not the Left’s destructive ideology.

AUTHOR

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of Family Research Council and executive editor of The Washington Stand.

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Libs Up In Arms When Their Own Racism Gets Shoved In Their Face

Turns Out Americans Were Unhappier Than Ever Before Under Biden’s Watch

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Trump Cuts Off Student Loan Forgiveness to LGBTQ Activists, Open Borders Groups, and Terrorists

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As part of his ongoing efforts to root out federal programs that underwrite left-wing programs at taxpayer expense, President Donald Trump has curbed a program that forgives student loans for those who work for groups that promote illegal immigration, terrorism, anti-American policies, or facilitate “child mutilation” through transgender surgeries.

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF), created by the 2007 College Cos tReduction and Access Act signed by President George W. Bush, allows college graduates to write-off their loans if they worked as public servants in the government or a nonprofit organization and made at least 10 years (120 months) of repayments. It also caps those payments at 10% of income above 150% of the poverty line.

But “instead of alleviating worker shortages in necessary occupations, the PSLF Program has misdirected tax dollars into activist organizations that not only fail to serve the public interest, but actually harm our national security and American values” through its “subsidization of illegal activities, including illegal immigration, human smuggling, child trafficking, pervasive damage to public property, and disruption of the public order, which threaten the security and stability of the United States,” says the executive order, which was released on March 7.

The order, entitled “Restoring Public Service Loan Forgiveness,” bars student loan forgiveness to employees of 501(c)3 organizations “whose activities have a substantial illegal purpose.” That list includes those who take part in “child abuse, including the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents.”

The order also bars “supporting terrorism,” violating federal immigration laws, and “engaging in a pattern of aiding and abetting illegal discrimination” often under the banner of advancing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI).

Organizations that regularly engage in “trespassing, disorderly conduct, public nuisance, vandalism and obstruction of highways” — such as protests illegally blocking highways and intersections — also lose PSLF eligibility.

“The Biden Administration was accused of using the student loan forgiveness program to pay pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas activists and criminals with taxpayer dollars,” added a White House fact sheet accompanying the order.

Much of the focus will go toward defunding organizations that actively assist illegal immigrants en route to, or residing in, the United States. Scholars at the Center for Immigration Studies discovered that “the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have been mainlining taxpayer funds” to more than 30 faith-based NGOs that offered “cash debit cards, food, clothing, medical treatment, shelter, and even ‘humanitarian transportation’ during 2024 to millions of U.S.-bound immigrants in 17 Latin American nations and Mexico.” Last April alone, the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Homeland Security doled out $300 million to nonprofits that shelter illegal immigrants through the government’s Shelter and Services Program (SSP), administered by FEMA. “Of those recently awarded grants, 35 are NGOs,” revealed the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) at the time. Illegal immigrants often stayed at four-star hotels at taxpayer expense, even as the Democratic administration claimed FEMA lacked the funds to care for hurricane-struck U.S. citizens.

Republicans have sought to change the tax-exempt status of NGOs that facilitate the illegal flow of drugs and human traffickers across the border. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) recently introduced the Fixing Exemptions for Networks Choosing to Enable Illegal Migration (FENCE) Act (S. 497), which would revoke the tax-exempt status of NGOs that consistently aid illegal immigrants.

“It’s absurd that our federal government has been giving tax exemptions and federal funding to NGOs that have helped facilitate record illegal immigration and carry out the far-left’s agenda, while cloaked as charities,” said Hagerty last month. “President Trump’s executive order requiring a review of federal funding to NGOs will expose this malpractice that has occurred for too long. I’m pleased to introduce this legislation that will augment the President’s work to hold these NGOs accountable by revoking their tax-exempt statuses.”

Conservative Christians cheered the reforms. “In fact, 25 percent of the U.S. workforce are employed in ‘public service’ occupations as currently defined, which can include everything from NPR employees to Planned Parenthood,” noted Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.), a pastor who chairs the Education and Workforce Committee. “President Trump is stepping up by preventing these activists from receiving windfalls in forgiveness benefits footed by taxpayers.”

But teachers unions and liberals charged the president with violating the First Amendment by refusing to underwrite left-wing political activism, even if it skirts, or transgresses, the law. “The president claims to be committed to ‘free speech,’ but we’ve quickly discovered that pledge doesn’t apply to higher education and now, PSLF,” griped Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), who helped craft the Biden administration’s public school lockdown policy. “He wants to impose an ideological litmus test antithetical to American values.” Mike Pierce, executive director of the liberal Student Borrower Protection Center, decried the order as “an attack on working families everywhere,” although the evidence suggests the program benefits graduate students and doctors.

“Estimates show that the top one-fifth of households owe $3 in student loan debt for every $1 held by the bottom fifth,” found the Heritage Foundation, which called for the abolition of PSLF. Critics say student loan “forgiveness” is immoral, because it creates perverse incentives and forces those who never went to college to pay for the bad behavior of those who did.

PSLF has had a troubled history since its formation under the second Bush administration. Users said the program had vague criteria, offered bad advice, and ultimately denied 99% of applications to have their remaining student loan debt expunged. The Biden-Harris administration significantly expanded the number of borrowers whose debt was assumed by taxpayers through the controversial program, from 7,000 when he took office to 1,069,000 borrowers representing $78.5 billion in debt when he left.

Members of the Obama-Biden administration publicly declared they had used the PSLF program to have taxpayers foot the bill as they enacted far-left social policies. “I was lucky enough to land my dream job working in President Obama’s White House on the Domestic Policy Council. For nearly the entire second term, I helped push for policies that aimed to bend the arc of the moral universe a little more toward justice — from women’s equality to foster care to LGBTQ rights to criminal justice reform,” boasted Molly Dillon in 2017. “[T]he Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program made it possible for me [to] use my education for a career in public service without the fear of a lifetime of debt.”

By no longer writing off student loan debt, the Trump administration may discourage students from working for left-wing activist groups whose activities further social lawlessness. “If Trump does prohibit some workers from getting student loan forgiveness, there could be larger implications for the impacted nonprofits, with potentially fewer job applicants for open roles at those organizations in the future,” reports Newsweek.

Whatever changes will come, they will not take place immediately. The Federal Student Aid office announced Monday that it was “reviewing” the executive order. “The PSLF Program is not changing today, and borrowers do not need to take any action,” it said.

Some urge caution in changing the criteria of federal programs, because a future left-wing president could deny loan forgiveness to conservative nonprofits, much as the Obama-Biden administration targeted Tea Party groups for heightened IRS scrutiny. “To avoid this corrosive legal ping pong, all student loan borrowers should be treated the same,” wrote Andrew Gillen at the Cato Institute. “Rather than debate about which organizations are eligible for PSLF, we should get rid of PSLF entirely.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Whoopi Goldberg: ‘God Doesn’t Make Mistakes’ … Except on Transgenderism?

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Senators Express Optimism That Trump Will Restore Pro-Life Policies at HHS

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Following four years of the Biden administration reversing the pro-life federal policies established during President Donald Trump’s first term, Republican senators are expressing confidence that the incoming Trump administration will put back in place policies that blocked federal funds from going to abortion businesses, allowed pregnancy resource centers to receive federal funds, and stopped the funding of international groups that promote abortion, among other measures.

After Trump nominated former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to serve as his secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) last November, concerns arose among numerous GOP lawmakers and pro-life advocacy groups that the former Democrat-turned-Independent presidential nominee would sideline pro-life policies based on his past pro-abortion positions. During his presidential run, Kennedy has called the abortion issue “nuanced and complex” and also said that the state should not “dictate choices that the woman is making” regarding abortion. He has also previously supported (and walked back support for) three-month pro-life protections.

However, Senate Republicans like Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) say they have received personal assurances from Kennedy that he will not pursue pro-abortion policies while in office and will, in fact, enact pro-life ones. Last month, Hawley posted a series of tweets describing his conversation with Kennedy regarding the issue. “He committed to me to reinstate President Trump’s prolife policies at HHS,” Hawley wrote. “That includes reinstating the Mexico City policy & ending taxpayer funding for abortions domestically.”

The senator further noted Kennedy’s promise to have all pro-life deputies at HHS and that he “believes there are far too many abortions in the US and that we cannot be the moral leader of the free world with abortion rates so high.” Hawley also stated that Kennedy promised to reinstate “the bar on Title X funds going to organizations that promote abortion” and to “reinstate conscience protections for healthcare providers.”

During Tuesday’s edition of “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Senator Steve Daines (R-Mont.) confirmed that he too met with Kennedy and also received assurances from him that he would pursue pro-life policies within the federal agency.

“We had a very robust discussion,” he explained. “In fact, talking about the importance of protecting the pro-life policies in terms of regulations coming out of HHS, but importantly, restoring any policies that the Biden administration has stripped, and to … work with the secretary of State [to ensure] we are doing all we can within the executive branch to make sure these protections are in place and, frankly, expanded. And he told me that he’ll have seven [deputies in] HHS [that] would be pro-life type of leaders. And I appreciate that honesty and frankness from RFK Jr.”

The news comes amid uncertainty surrounding how pro-life Trump’s second administration will be after the president-elect oversaw watered-down pro-life language inserted into the 2024 Republican Party platform last July, which was entirely revamped and truncated from the previous GOP platform. Trump also repeatedly said on the campaign trail last year that he would leave the abortion issue to the states and that some state pro-life protections are “too tough.” The 45th president’s inconsistent rhetoric on the issue has left pro-life lawmakers and advocates wondering if he would, in fact, use his executive authority to undo the pro-abortion executive orders that President Joe Biden enacted.

Nevertheless, in an op-ed published Monday, Hawley reiterated his optimism that the president-elect will restore the pro-life policies that were reversed under Biden. The senator noted that in addition to restoring the Mexico City Policy, barring abortion businesses from receiving Title X grant money, and restoring federal funding to pregnancy resource centers, Trump’s first-term HHS also “restrict[ed] the use of human fetal tissue obtained from abortions.”

“The Biden administration gutted those rules,” Hawley concluded. “Thankfully, it’s a new day. And President Trump has the power to start protecting life again — immediately. He should use that power boldly to protect those who most need it: the innocent unborn.”

AUTHOR

Dan Hart

Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Groundbreaking Troop Bill Heads to Biden’s Desk with First-Ever Rebuke of Trans Ideology

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After a frustrating and bitterly divided year in Congress, one thing that will go down as a bright shining success for the GOP is the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). On Wednesday, the Senate voted to send the 1,800-page behemoth to President Joe Biden’s desk, where he will be forced to do something neither side ever thought possible: sign a bill protecting children from his radical transgender agenda.

It’s a stunning turn of events for both parties. For Republicans, the idea that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) could negotiate a deal that not only stopped taxpayer-funded gender transitions for military kids, but also erased the women in the draft provision and axed diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts with his narrow majority still has insiders shaking their heads in amazement. On the flip side, it shows just how vulnerable Democrats are after the November elections — especially on the trans issue, which pollsters almost universally believe cost Kamala Harris the White House.

That’s not to say that some of Schumer’s extremists didn’t put up a fight. Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) was furious at the policy change, threatening — for the first time in her career — to vote against the NDAA, “a position I do not take lightly,” she insisted. “It’s flat-out wrong,” she fumed on the Senate floor, arguing that taxpayers should be forced to fork over their hard-earned dollars for the butchery of children.

In a move that was mostly for show, Baldwin fought to add an amendment to the NDAA that would reinstate the language for taxpayer-funded gender surgeries and hormones. “Let’s be clear: we’re talking about parents who are in uniform serving our country who have earned the right to make the best decisions for their families,” Baldwin and 20 senators wrote. “I trust our servicemembers and their doctors to make the best healthcare decisions for their kids, not politicians.”

The amendment to remove the protections for minors was backed by Democratic Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey (Mass.), Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono (Hawaii), Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden (Ore.), Cory Booker and Andy Kim (N.J.), Dick Durbin (Ill.), Patty Murray (Wash.), Chris Van Hollen (Md.), Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), Alex Padilla (Calif.), John Fetterman (Pa.), Martin Heinrich (N.M.), John Hickenlooper (Colo.), and Chris Murphy and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.).

FRC’s senior director for Government Affairs, Quena Gonzalez, dismissed the push as “rank political theater.” “The effort failed,” he pointed out to The Washington Stand, “because it was designed to fail. If the Democrats who run the Senate had really wanted to block protections for military kids from taxpayer-funded gender transition procedures, they could’ve done that before the bill was ever negotiated with the Republican-led House.”

Instead, he points out, “language to protect kids was included in the base House text and in the base Senate text, even before it was negotiated. So to complain now — and file an amendment that won’t get 60 votes and is therefore doomed to fail — is pure posturing. Why did they wait until now, when it’s too late to do anything meaningful?” Gonzalez wondered. “Maybe they knew they didn’t have the votes. Or maybe they understood that it’s a political loser, but feel they have to keep pandering to their hard-core radical base. Two House Democrats, Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), wasted no time blaming the Left’s extremism on the related ‘gender identity’ issue of boys being allowed in girls’ sports, restrooms, showers, and locker rooms, etc.”

Fortunately for the Democratic Party, Schumer wouldn’t allow his senators to press the issue. Rather than let his members take a politically damaging vote that puts them on the record for a policy that Americans are very much against, he quietly shelved the amendment, telling the press brightly, “The NDAA is now on a glide path to final passage.” Throwing a bone to his far-Left caucus, he added, “Of course, the NDAA is not perfect. It doesn’t have everything either side would like. … But of course, you need bipartisanship to get this through the finish line.”

To most observers, this is one of the biggest signs yet that the country is at a tipping point on extreme gender ideology. “The passage of this NDAA is a huge loss for the Left,” Gonzalez insists. “Democrats ran for president and for Congress in part by calling conservatives who stood up to the woke mob ‘transphobic.’ For the longest time, we Christians have been told that we’re ‘on the wrong side of history,’ but we are on the right side of truth. This should give Christians courage,” he underscored. “When we stand up univocally for truth, even when it’s not culturally popular, we stand for unchanging principles that will ultimately be vindicated by a much higher authority than Congress, the president, or the Supreme Court.”

By way of background, the speaker explained to Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “This Week on the Hill,” that the NDAA is usually passed with broad bipartisan agreement — a rarity in a city that can barely agree on anything. This year, he said, “We had some unnecessary controversy. One of the things that we were really focused on is … return[ing] the emphasis of our national defense policy to national defense. And so, we really were on guard to make sure that a lot of the woke progressive agenda was not part of that policy prescription. And we prevailed in that.”

Jubilantly, Johnson pointed out, “We, for the first time in federal law, will be preventing [the funding of] trans surgeries on minors. … You know, there [are] about two million-plus children that are [in] military families that are insured by Tricare, which is the big federal insurer. And we wanted to make sure that those taxpayer-funded dollars don’t go in any way to the provision of any kind of ‘gender-affirming care,’ as they call it. That would do dramatic harm — permanent harm — to these young people.”

Asked what it says about the Democratic Party that they’d pursue this cultural obsession at the expense of our military, the speaker could only shake his head. “I wish I could tell you,” he said. “I think that there [are] some on the Left [who] want to use every institution of the government to advance their woke progressive socialist policies [and] experiments, [hoping for] the transformational kind of change that they always brag about that they want to hoist upon America. But I can tell you what this election cycle affirmed for us, and that is that the American people are not having that. I mean, I think that’s one of the large reasons why President Donald J. Trump got reelected with the large mandate he has and why we won control of the Senate and the House for the Republican Party, because we’re advancing common-sense ideas. These traditional ideas that have made our country what it is are still held by the American people.”

At the end of the day, Johnson believes, “We’re still a center-Right country — in spite of what they’ve been trying to convince us of for the last several years, that we’ve gone progressive Left. We have not. And the American people demand common sense. They demand and desire and certainly need a military that is focused on lethality and protecting our national interest.”

Now, he celebrated, “This experimental, non-scientific nonsense that’s been going on everywhere will no longer be a part of the federal health care of our military servicemembers. So that was a big win. And we did a lot of other things as well,” he wanted people to know. “We’re trying to root out the DEI education nonsense in the military academies. And it goes on and on. But in addition to all of that, we also included the largest pay increase in many years for active-duty service members, enlisted members, a little over 14% pay raise. And that’s desperately needed. And we also added a lot of things to help with the quality of life for those who put on the uniform to serve our country, their families, and those related to them. So a lot of great, great wins in this policy, and we’re really excited that it got over the line.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

RELATED ARTICLE: Disney Leaves LGBT Activism on Cutting Room Floor in New Series

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Pro-Life Leaders Praise ‘Beautiful’ Plan for DOGE to Defund Planned Parenthood

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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s plans to protect taxpayers from wasteful spending will take a scalpel to Planned Parenthood funding, reasserting Americans’ financial autonomy by removing federal funds from the nation’s largest abortion chain.

The pair outlined their vision for the forthcoming Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, specifically underscoring plans to enact a host of policies long supported by pro-life advocates and government efficiency experts alike.

“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,” wrote Musk and Ramaswamy.

Planned Parenthood received $699.3 million in taxpayer funding fiscal year and carried out 392,712 abortions in its 2022-2023 fiscal year, according to its most recent annual report.

Taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood surged $65.9 million since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, even as inflation and a slow economic recovery from the artificial COVID-19 shutdowns eroded Americans’ real income.

Some of Planned Parenthood’s spending has been blatantly political. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Planned Parenthood announced plans to spend $140 million on supporting Democratic candidates who support abortion (and abortion funding) and to launch a long-term campaign to expand abortion in all 50 states. Their policy outline included $40 million on door-to-door canvassing, TV and online advertising, phone banks, and direct mail targeting voters in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Montana, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in the 2024 presidential election. It also joined other left-wing organizations to launch a 10-year, $100 million campaign aimed at “securing access to abortion care in every state.”

Planned Parenthood’s annual report also notes the abortion chain spent $46.7 million on “public policy” and $14.8 to “engage communities.”

Pro-life and pro-family leaders welcomed the efforts to extricate taxpayers from funding Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion chain which has increasingly stepped into carrying out transgender procedures, often to minors as young as 12.

“Americans work hard for their money — and under the Biden administration, despite loads of hard work, that money didn’t go very far. For many, the economy was a top issue in this election. Working to ensure that American taxpayer dollars are only used in ways that work to further the good of our nation is at the forefront of the Trump administration’s agenda,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand. “It was beautiful to see that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have recognized that using American taxpayer dollars to fund the killing of unborn children is a complete waste of money. It is inefficient on so many levels — including that it robs Americans of future generations of children. I look forward to seeing the other areas DOGE recognizes as a waste of taxpayer dollars; this first announcement signaled that rebuilding a culture of life is part of taking back America.”

Family Research Council President Tony Perkins found “lots of good news in this plan,” specifically highlighting its calls to:

  • Defund Planned Parenthood.
  • Defund international [organizations] at odds with our interests.
  • Defund PBS/NPR.
  • Mass rescissions of unconstitutional regulations that exceed the authority of the Executive branch.
  • Return the federal workforce to the office five days a week, which “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America (SFLA), had raised the issue of defunding Planned Parenthood repeatedly in recent days. “Hey DOGE, our tax dollars fund abortion,” she posted on social media last Thursday. “Taxpayers should not be forced to fund abortion. If President Trump’s goal is to end federal involvement in abortion, we must start by defunding & debarring Planned Parenthood.”

SBA Pro-Life America noted that Planned Parenthood had amassed a whopping $2.5 billion in net assets. “They should never get taxpayer dollars,” said the group, as it thanked Musk and Ramaswamy “for focusing on this important issue.”

Lila Rose of Live Action described the DOGE defunding proposal as “Amazing!”

Liberty Counsel hoped DOGE’s policy will push toward “ending all taxpayer-funded abortion.” Human Life International called DOGE’s focus on defunding anti-life programs “such good news” but asked Christians to “pray that this includes defunding global anti-life programs.”

“The federal government shouldn’t be in the business of giving away free money to non-governmental organizations. That should be obvious,” Ramaswamy commented separately.

But Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson lashed out at Musk and Ramaswamy, deriding them as “agents of chaos.”

Defunding Planned Parenthood means “wreaking havoc on our public health system, of which Planned Parenthood is an integral part,” she contended.

“Planned Parenthood doesn’t get a blank check from the federal government. Like any other health care provider, or hospital, Planned Parenthood affiliates are reimbursed for services provided to patients at health centers,” she asserted. “What Musk and Ramaswamy call ‘federal overspending’ provides critical and necessary sexual and reproductive health care to thousands of people every day — care that will disappear if they get their way.”

But Planned Parenthood officials settled a Medicaid fraud investigation, paying the state of Texas $4.3 million in 2013. Planned Parenthood’s Houston affiliate, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast (PPGC), “improperly billed the Texas Medicaid program for products and services that were never actually rendered, not medically necessary, and were not covered by the Medicaid program — and were therefore not eligible for reimbursement,” announced then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott (R), who is now governor. Planned Parenthood accepted no blame in the settlement.

Wisconsin state auditors also concluded that up to two-thirds of all Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood facilities were fraudulent in 2016.

The abortion industry CEO said Planned Parenthood had defeated efforts to defund it in the past and would win again. “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,” she claimed.

But Planned Parenthood gave up federal funding rather than choosing to reduce taxpayer-funded abortion advocacy. President Donald Trump stipulated in 2019 that recipients of federal family planning funding through Title X cannot refer women for or carry out abortions. Rather than “fending off” the fight or continuing to provide “care,” the Planned Parenthood Federation of America pulled out of Title X in 2019. President Joe Biden reversed the Trump administration’s pro-life policy in October 2021.

The Planned Parenthood CEO also noted that “50% of Planned Parenthood patients are enrolled in Medicaid and other federal and state programs for uninsured patients,” pointing out other potential revenue streams for DOGE to eliminate.

All branches of government aim to assist DOGE. House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) announced that he plans to create a Government Efficiency Subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in the forthcoming Congress.

The administration’s plans call for DOGE to end all operations on Independence Day: July 4, 2026.

“Our North Star for reform will be the U.S. Constitution,” wrote Musk and Ramaswamy. “There is no better birthday gift to our nation on its 250th anniversary than to deliver a federal government that would make our Founders proud.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

CatholicVote Exposes Harris’s Support for Funding Gender Transition Surgeries for Kids

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A conservative Catholic advocacy group is launching an ad campaign across swing states exposing Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded mutilative gender transition procedures on children. CatholicVote began airing ads on Monday using Medicaid data to reveal that the incumbent Biden-Harris administration has been using American taxpayer dollars to fund the procedures — including mastectomies, hysterectomies, and penis amputations — on minors. The campaign’s target audience are Catholic voters and parents in swing states.

“Medicaid data shows 97 underage girls had their breasts completely removed, 14 underage girls underwent hysterectomies,” the ad airing in Pennsylvania exclaims. Billing the procedures as “taxpayer-funded experiments on kids,” the ad continues, “Sex-change operations attempting to make young boys into girls, penis amputations. Sound weird? Disgusting? It is. And you’re paying for it. Kamala Harris supports these taxpayer-funded sex change operations. A vote for Harris [is] a vote for medical experiments on kids.”

Tommy Valentine, director of CatholicVote’s Catholic Accountability Project, told The Washington Stand, “We thought it was about time someone exposed the graphic details of what transgender surgeries really do to children. These ‘surgeries’ are really just mutilations. They’re irreversible and life-changing.” He added, “People should be uncomfortable with the ad because they are paying for these surgeries with their tax dollars. If Kamala Harris gets elected, these numbers are going to skyrocket, and thousands of children will be left devastated.”

“Thousands of trans surgeries are happening — on kids — across the country. Double mastectomies on young girls. Hysterectomies. Amputation of boys’ genitalia. Full skin grafts to forehead, chin, underarms, genitals, hands, and feet,” CatholicVote President Brian Burch explained. “The Biden-Harris administration is using your tax dollars today to pay for them. And Kamala Harris wants to expand these medical experiments on kids. … This ad is hard to watch for a reason. Because the truth is sickening. America’s children are being carved up and sterilized.”

According to CatholicVote’s ads, 35 underage girls in Michigan were subjected to double mastectomies and seven to hysterectomies, as part of gender transition procedures. In Wisconsin, 86 girls were subjected to double mastectomies and 12 to hysterectomies. CatholicVote is airing an ad in Spanish in Nevada, to reach Hispanic-American Catholics. In the Silver State, 18 underage girls were subjected to double mastectomies and three to hysterectomies. “The number of trans mutilations on kids is already shockingly high. If Kamala Harris wins, how many more children’s bodies will she help destroy?” Burch asked. “None — if we stop her.”

The Biden-Harris administration has long been among the top promoters of gender transition procedures, including for minors. Harris’s recently-announced policies for a potential presidency include continuing and even ramping up that promotion of transgenderism and related surgeries. In addition to adjusting civil rights legislation to protect “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” likely forcing American Christians to violate their sincerely-held religious beliefs in order to avoid breaking the law, Harris also suggests scrapping state legislation like Ohio’s Saving Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, which bars targeting children for gender transition procedures, including puberty blockers and hormone drugs. In 2019, Harris endorsed using taxpayer dollars to perform gender transition procedures on federal prisoners and detained illegal immigrants, a position so outrageous that mainstream media “fact-checkers” labeled it as false last week, before correcting themselves.

Commenting to TWS on CatholicVote’s ad campaign, Family Research Council Senior Fellow Meg Kilgannon said, “Vice President Harris is completely on board with the gender agenda. From her time in California government to the present, Harris has supported the most radical LGBTQ+ demands. She believes that children can be born in the wrong body and should be allowed to change their sex.” Kilgannon continued, “The danger of such beliefs being weaponized by leaders in our government is apparent. This, along with Harris’s extremist abortion advocacy, should disqualify her from consideration for Catholic voters. Thanks to CatholicVote for pointing this out in such clear terms.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Planned Parenthood Committed 392,712 Abortions, Received $699.3 Million in Taxpayer Funding in 2023

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Despite seeing fewer patients and reducing bona fide health care services, Planned Parenthood received a record-breaking amount of taxpayer funding last year, according to Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson in the organization’s most recent annual report, which she describes as a “love note” to abortionists.

Planned Parenthood committed 392,712 abortions and received a record-breaking $699.3 million in taxpayer funding in the 2022-2023 fiscal year, according to its most recent annual report released on Wednesday.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s affiliates perpetrated an average of 1,076 abortions every day of the year, as they amassed $1.8 billion in revenue and $2.5 billion in net assets.

Government funding for the abortion giant increased, although Planned Parenthood saw 80,000 fewer patients (2.05 million) last year than in 2022 (2.13 million), according to PPFA’s annual report, titled “Above & Beyond,” which covers the fiscal year which ran from July 2022 to June 2023.

Despite complaining of about half the country enacting pro-life protections for children since the Dobbs decision, the number of abortions Planned Parenthood carried out surged in the last year. Abortions increased by 18,557 over last year — when Planned Parenthood committed 374,155 abortions and received $670.4 million in taxpayer funding, during its 2021-2022 fiscal year — an increase of 9,252 abortions over pre-Dobbs levels.

“This report is our love note” to abortionists, writes Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson.

Pro-life advocates observed Planned Parenthood has inflicted a ponderous number of deaths on innocent Americans last year. “This is a record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40% of the abortions performed in the United States,” said Michael New, a senior associate scholar at Charlotte Lozier Institute, in a statement emailed to The Washington Stand. “This puts abortions performed by Planned Parenthood in the top four leading causes of death in the United States, after heart disease, cancer and COVID-19,” SBA Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser told TWS.

Taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood surged by $28.9 million over last year and $65.9 million since 2021. Taxpayer revenue accounts for one-third (34%) of Planned Parenthood’s revenue. “Planned Parenthood dropped this bombshell report while many Americans are still recovering from Tax Day,” said Dannenfelser. “Bidenomics has turned into abortionomics.”

“Meanwhile, while your average American’s annual income is down,” wrote Hugh Brown, executive vice president of the American Life League, in a statement emailed to TWS. “We can barely afford necessities — and our government’s answer? Funnel $700 million to the elite baby killers.”

The funding increase comes although a majority (53%) of Americans oppose funding abortion in the United States, and larger majorities oppose foreign abortion funding. Although presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has yet to announce he will protect U.S. taxpayers from funding Planned Parenthood in his second term, he released a Protect Life rule preventing Title X family funding recipients from referring women for abortions in July 2019, his third year in office. Planned Parenthood withdrew from the Title X program rather than curtail or redirect its abortion business.

However, President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s order in October 2021 and subsequently opened multiple funding avenues to the abortion franchise. “The federal government should not be funding the facilitation of abortion in any form or fashion — at home or abroad,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins has noted.

More Money, Fewer Health Care Services

The increased funding comes despite the fact that the number of genuine health care services Planned Parenthood offers has fallen precipitously. “Between 2022 and 2023, preventive-care visits fell by 31.0%, pap tests fell by 13.5%, cancer screenings fell by 1.4%, and adoption referrals fell by 4.5%. Interestingly, for every adoption referral in 2023, Planned Parenthood performed over 228 abortions,” explained New. “In the past 10 years, the number of abortions performed by Planned Parenthood has increased by 20%. Meanwhile, cancer screenings fell by more than 58%, and prenatal services declined by more than 67%.”

The report highlights PPFA’s commitment to selling women on abortion, say critics. “Once again, pregnant women who walk into Planned Parenthood are sold an abortion 97% of the time, rather than helped to keep their child or make an adoption plan. Meanwhile, they saw 80,000 fewer patients, provided 60,000 fewer pap tests and breast exams, and even gave out less contraception,” Dannenfelser told TWS.

PPFA increased its bottom line by working on the logistics of abortions in pro-life states. Some “90 patient navigators across 41 Planned Parenthood affiliates helped more than 33,000 people get the transportation and travel support, financial assistance, and referrals they needed to get abortion,” its report states.

Planned Parenthood compared its abortion-expansion activities to the miracles wrought by faith in Jesus Christ. “For Planned Parenthood [abortion] staff, this was a year of moving mountains: finding appointments in other states and the resources to get patients there, building as much capacity as possible for abortion appointments, fulfilling increased demand in some places for birth control, and much more,” the organization writes. PPFA claimed it provided financial support to 15,000 people for travel for out-of-state abortion and funding for 50,000 mothers to have an abortion. It did not state how it raised these funds.

Transgender Procedures, Abortion Advocacy, and Abortifacients

The latest update reveals that the abortion business’s concerted drive to profit from expanded transgender procedures advanced in 2023. Planned Parenthood refused to specifically disclose how many transgender procedures the abortion franchise carried out in the last fiscal year, lumping its transgender business among 177,237 “Other Procedures.” PPFA reported a mere 15,902 “other procedures” in its 2020-2021 report.

The report revealed that 45 of Planned Parenthood’s 49 affiliates perpetrated transgender procedures in 2022 — up from 41 the previous year and just 30 in the 2020-2021 fiscal year. This year’s report includes first-person testimonials praising PPFA for administering life-altering, sterilizing, and bone-depleting hormone injections. “As a trans woman, the services provided to me saved my life. I am so grateful for the services you provide to ALL women,” wrote the man.

Planned Parenthood and its international affiliate, Planned Parenthood Global, committed tens of millions of dollars to abortion expansion at home and abroad. Planned Parenthood boasts of its 30 open lawsuits against pro-life protections, winning injunctions preventing seven states from defending unborn children from abortion. Its U.S. affiliates spent $46.7 million on “public policy” and $14.8 to “engage communities.”

Planned Parenthood Global dedicated $113 million to abortion “advocacy,” partnering with 80 organizations in nine countries. Its activities included “community-based access to misoprostol,” the second pill in the chemical abortion cocktail, which can be used on its own to induce abortion (with varying degrees of harm to mothers). The abortion business directed 90% of its efforts toward nations that protect unborn children’s lives in the law, such as Mexico, where its efforts led to “the legalization of abortion in Quintana Roo up to 12 weeks — a decision affecting 470,000 women of reproductive age in the state.”

Contraception remained a cornerstone of the PPFA business model in 2023. PPFA distributed contraception 2,250,913 times, including implanting long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs) in 1,548,022 people and distributing 552,721 so-called “Emergency Contraception” kits. All hormonal contraception may potentially act as an abortifacient by making it impossible for a newly conceived/fertilized child to implant in the uterine wall.

PPFA shapes the way young people see sex both through partnerships with public schools and online influencers. “Planned Parenthood is proud to be the nation’s largest sex educator,” writes McGill Johnson in the report’s opening summary. Planned Parenthood’s videos were viewed three million times, and PPFA reached 1.2 million people through education or training sessions. “PPFA launched a national campaign across platforms to destigmatize abortion,” the report notes.

PPFA also plans to shape academic views by producing “scientific” studies promoting its view of the abortion controversy. In all, “34 Planned Parenthood affiliates participated in 47 studies” last year, including one focusing on “potential logistical, financial, and other burdens of travel faced by patients who are forced to travel for their” abortion, the report states.

Planned Parenthood’s report also raises concerns over possible censorship. A section of the annual report titled “Shifting Culture” states PPFA is “leading tech companies to discuss how to improve corporate accountability and address health care misinformation.”

The report takes on added importance as abortion has emerged as the dominant theme of the Biden-Harris reelection campaign and Democratic campaigns generally. “Vice President Kamala Harris even made a campaign stop at a Planned Parenthood abortion center,” noted Dannenfelser. Harris called pro-life laws “immoral” during the visit. “In turn, their political arm spends more than any other abortion-related group to lobby the federal government against commonsense policies like protecting babies born alive after failed abortions.”

AUTHOR

Ben Johnson

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2024 Family Research Council.

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The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.