The House took the first step toward stripping Planned Parenthood of its federal funding, a tentative win for social conservatives as Republicans push President Donald Trump‘s legislative agenda through Congress.
Republicans tucked language into their House megabill that would block Medicaid from reimbursing Planned Parenthood and other health providers that offer abortions, according to bill text released by the Energy and Commerce Committee on Sunday night.
With limited exceptions, federal law already bars taxpayer dollars from being used for abortions. However, the organization receives hundreds of millions in funding for health services, including STD and cancer screenings that qualify under the program.
Republicans have tried for years to strip federal funding from the abortion provider, only to see their efforts fall short in Congress. However, this iteration is broader than Planned Parenthood and applies to any provider that received more than a million dollars in Medicaid funding in 2024.
Centrist Republicans have balked at the provision, dampening its chances of making it into the final bill, which House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) hopes to pass by Memorial Day. Another challenge will be procedural hurdles in the Senate, where Republicans were forced to strike out a similar provision in 2017 as part of their Obamacare repeal legislation.
Planned Parenthood, which has run ads in the past pressuring swing district Republicans, pledged to “fight like hell” to oppose the language in a Sunday statement.
“With this proposal, abortion opponents in Congress have declared they want working families to take on skyrocketing health care costs so they can give billionaires a tax break,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
The abortion provision is part of a larger overhaul of Medicaid, in which Republicans hope to impose work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks for recipients.
Anti-abortion advocates, who have said the Medicaid reimbursements indirectly fund the procedure, praised the legislation as a “commonsense” way to “stop forcing taxpayers to fund the Big Abortion industry.”
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“Taxpayers should never be mandated to prop up an industry that profits from ending lives and harming women and girls,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, said in a statement.
The legislation follows steps by the Trump administration to pull back Planned Parenthood funding. Last month, the administration froze tens of millions of Title X dollars directed to family planning centers, targeting Planned Parenthood affiliates in several states.