taxes

Planned Parenthood Receives Millions of Dollars Through Federal ‘Family Planning’ Grants

This is Part 1 of a two-part series examining the federal government’s support of Planned Parenthood under the guise of “family planning.”

The federal government pours tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into pro-abortion organizations like Planned Parenthood every year, a Daily Citizen investigation reveals, using Title X “family planning” grants.

The loophole effectively allows presidential administrations to violate the Hyde Amendment, a congressional spending restriction prohibiting taxes from funding or enabling elective abortions.

Title X is a federal grant program supporting “comprehensive family planning and related health services.” The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) distributes Title X money to organizations that provide “contraceptive services, supplies and information.”

HHS’ oversight gives the executive branch substantial authority to determine whether pro-abortion organizations can qualify for Title X funds. Under pro-abortion presidential administrations, Planned Parenthood has received hundreds of millions of Title X dollars.  

Between fiscal years 2017 and 2025, HHS promised to pay $156.9 million to Planned Parenthood entities through 91 different grants. More than 80% ($126.3 million) of this money paid out of two funding buckets associated with Title X — Family Planning Services and Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs.

But the abortion conglomerate, worth some $2.9 billion, hit a snag in 2019, when President Trump issued a rule requiring Title X-funded organizations to:

  • Refrain from referring women to get abortions;
  • “Maintain strict physical and financial separation from abortion services.”

The rule cost Planned Parenthood entities millions in taxpayer money. Between 2019 and 2021, the federal government owed the group a cumulative $20.9 million — significantly less than the $29.4 million promised in 2017 alone.

“The new rule forced Planned Parenthood health centers, along with many others, to withdraw from the Title X program,” the group complained, implicitly admitting it had previously mixed abortion services with federally-funded activities.

The Biden administration rescinded Trump’s Title X rule in 2021, allowing Planned Parenthood to continue gobbling taxpayer money. HHS paid the abortion giant more than $53.7 million in Title X grants between 2022 and 2025. Another $12.4 million is scheduled to pay out by June 2028.

Money is fungible; even if Planned Parenthood doesn’t use Title X money to fund abortions directly, the grants free up unregulated funds to perform and promote them.

What’s more, the 2021 HHS rule allows Planned Parenthood and its ilk to treat vulnerable women as sources of income.

Abortion providers make money by referring women to get abortions. In its most recent financial disclosures, Planned Parenthood reports raking in $383.3 million in between July 2023 and July 2024.

President Trump began reestablishing his pro-life legacy just days after starting his second term. On January 24, he issued two orders plugging some federal funding streams to elective abortions.

The first order reinstated the Mexico City policy, which stops the federal government from funding organizations that support or enable elective abortions abroad. The second revoked two executive actions from the Biden administration — one defining abortion as “healthcare” and the other “protecting…and promoting” access to abortions domestically.

The Daily Citizen supports any executive action that defunds abortion. To truly halt taxpayer-funded abortion, however, HHS must reinstate President Trump’s 2019 Title X rules.

Additional Articles and Resources

Trump Signs Executive Order Limiting Taxpayer Funds for Abortion

Pentagon Ends Paid Travel Expenses and Time Off for Abortions

Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy Pledge to Finally Defund Planned Parenthood

House Passes Born-Alive Bill to Protect Babies Who Survive Abortions

Abortion Remains Highly Profitable Business for Planned Parenthood, New Annual Report Shows

Young Person Braves Planned Parenthood’s Social Media So You Don’t Have To — Here’s What Parents Need To Know

Trump, Vance, Other Republican Leaders All Speak at March for Life

INVESTIGATION: Taxpayers Fund Transgender Experiments on Children

The federal government has spent at least $6.8 million taxpayer dollars on grants funding transgender medical experiments on minors, a Daily Citizen investigation reveals.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is paying on three active, multi-year grants funding experiments testing the effects of opposite-sex hormones and so-called puberty blockers on minors. Worth a cumulative $16.4 million, the last of these grants won’t conclude until April 2026.

In 2015, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a subsidiary of HHS, promised to pay UCLA $9.7 million to conduct a study titled, “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth.”

In practice, the experiment involved injecting 95 gender confused kids with drugs designed to treat illnesses like prostate cancer and observing what happened to their brains. When it came time to release the results — that “puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements” — Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her colleagues demurred.

When The New York Times unearthed the buried study in October, Olson-Kennedy justified her decision:

[It] might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the young gender treatments in more than 20 states.

Olson-Kennedy is referring to states that ban doctors from performing the transgender medical interventions on minors — the kinds of “treatments” she’s made a living off.

Even crazier? Taxpayers are still paying for a study they’ve yet to see. According to federal grant documents, HHS will pay the remaining $6.6 million it promised by January 2026.

HHS will conclude a seven-year, $3.7 million grant to Leland Stanford Junior University in May, which went toward studying “sex hormone effects on neurodevelopment” and “controlled puberty in transgender adolescents.”

A large portion of the experiment fell under the direction of Dr. Stephen M. Rosenthal — the co-founder and medical director of UCSF’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center and one of the four doctors, including Olson-Kennedy, responsible for the UCLA experiment.

What a coincidence.

According to the college’s grant proposal, Rosenthal played a key roll in sourcing kids to experiment on:

Dr. Rosenthal will be a leading member of a [national] network of pediatric gender clinics’ medical directors and will assist in the dissemination of information regarding the study…for the purposes of establishing a referral stream for enrollment.

HHS’ third, and smallest, ongoing grant promises a cool $3 million to the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital to study, “The impact of pubertal suppression on adolescent, neural and mental health trajectories.”

More than 130 children participated in the study, which compared the wellbeing of those on puberty blockers with the wellbeing of those who haven’t.

In its grant proposal, the hospital admits that puberty blockers aren’t well researched:

Puberty blockers are the WPATH and Endocrine Society standard of care but [they] may also disrupt puberty-signaled neural maturation in ways that can undermine mental health gains over time and impact quality of life in other ways.
The overall impacts of [puberty blocker] treatments have not been systematically studied in order to probe these effects.

The implications of these grants are staggering, proving not only that the government uses taxpayer money to experiment on children, but that gender activists don’t answer to the people funding them. These government grantees aggressively recruit kids into the transgender medical pipeline and aren’t afraid to hide study results to bolster their own narrative.

American families deserve to know what their taxes pay for. Kids deserve to know their government isn’t interested in conducting inhumane experiments — least of all on them.

Seems like a pretty simple ask.

Additional Articles and Resources

Kansas Governor Vetoes ‘Help Not Harm’ Bill — Child Advocates Call for Override

Doctor Refuses to Publish Major Study Finding Puberty-Blocking Drugs Don’t Help Children

ACLU Lawyer Admits ‘Trans Them of They Die’ Warning is False

UK Bans Puberty Blockers for ‘Transgender’ Minors

American Society of Plastic Surgeons Backs Away From Supporting ‘Transgender’ Surgeries

U.K.’s Review of Child Gender Policy Reveals Profound Failures That U.S. Still Defends

Suicidal or Stable? WPATH Activist’s Contradictory Evaluation Secures Felon Transgender Surgery

The WPATH Files Exposes ‘Surgical and Hormonal Experiments on Children’

The WPATH Files – Transgender Interventions Are ‘Unethical Medical Experiments’

Transgenderism and Minors: What Does the Research Really Show?

Closing USAID Isn’t Crazy — Here’s Why

The Trump administration pulled the plug on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), America’s largest distributor of humanitarian aid, this week following an audit of its billion-dollar books.

“For decades, USAID has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats,” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Monday.

She referenced some of the agency’s most unconscionable expenditures of taxpayer dollars, including:

  • $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities.”
  • $6 million to Egyptian tourism.
  • Hundreds of millions to cultivate the poppy in Afghanistan (the main ingredient in heroin, the Taliban’s biggest money-maker).
  • More than $149,000 to fund foreign art projects celebrating DEI and LGBT-identified individuals, including a “transgender opera” and a “transgender comic book.”

Legislators, non-profits, activists and the United Nations have pitched an epic fit, claiming people will die without USAID’s aid. Some seemed particularly irate that Elon Musk, co-leader of the newly sanctioned Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), blew the whistle on the agency’s largesse.

“This is a five-alarm fire.” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “The people elected Donald Trump to be President — not Elon Musk … This should not be a partisan issue.”

But it doesn’t take a wizard to figure out that USAID squandered Americans’ money on stupid and immoral causes.

Let’s walk through a few examples.

USAID is charged with implementing the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a congressional aid package tackling the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The program will dispense $30 billion in assistance over five years.

But PEPFAR no longer distributes AIDS relief alone. In 2022, the government released a document connecting PEPFAR’s success with “sexual reproductive health, rights and services.” The semantic adjustment allows USAID to funnel PEPFAR money to fund elective abortions under the guise of “reproductive care.”

Between 2021 and 2022, more than 25 explicitly pro-abortion organizations spent a combined $1.34 billion PEPFAR donations.

One of these groups is the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF). USAID paid it $8.9 million between 2015 and 2025 to execute contracts related to expanding “family planning and sexual and reproductive health.”

IPPF’s current contract with USAID would have paid out $45 million by 2028.

In a statement opposing USAID’s closure and the State Department’s temporary pause on foreign aid spending, IPPF unwittingly revealed exactly what it uses PEPFAR money for:

[The US State Department’s] funding suspension initially impacted the over 20 million people living with HIV directly supported through PEPFAR. Later, however, a life-saving humanitarian assistance waiver walked back the decision, yet excludes activities related to abortion or family planning, gender or DEI programs, gender-affirming surgeries and other activities deemed to be non-life saving assistance.

In short, IPPF resents that money from an AIDS relief program will go only toward people suffering from AIDS.

It’s also concerned about diminished “sexual and reproductive health services,” linking to an Instagram post from a company called Gender DynamiX — “Africa’s first registered public benefit organization to focus solely on issues of trans and gender diverse persons.”

Without US tax dollars, it will have to stop administering opposite-sex hormones.

IPPF is far from the only organization to rely on US assistance. America pays roughly 30% of the United Nation’s $58 billion budget every year. A hefty portion of these donations come from USAID. In 2022, the agency gave $10.9 billion to UN subsidiaries.

You remember the UN? The group behind the UN Relief Agency in Palestine, some employees of whom contributed to Hamas’ devastating attack on Israel in October 2023?

The international body that ignored Hamas’ violence against women for months?

The same body that refused to condemn Hamas, but allowed Iran to lead the Human Rights Council’s Commission on Crime Prevention and Justice just days after it executed two people for criticizing Islam?

Yes, that UN would be devastated without the US’ help. It’s particularly concerned about the impact such cuts could have on the sexual health of women in South Asia — especially those with “unintended pregnancies.”

Given these examples, and USAID’s larger disconnect from taxpayers’ interests, it’s not surprising a complete overhaul has been ordered.

But the mismanagement and misuse of USAID also illuminates crucial failures in how the government distributes taxes.

American families shouldn’t have to wade through manipulative and deceptive language to discern how their hard-earned money is being spent They shouldn’t have to wonder whether their government is bilking them, or pouring cash into corrupt and ineffective organizations in service of causes they don’t believe in.

TLDR: This author isn’t sad to see the back of USAID.

Additional Articles and Resources

The UN’s Palestinian Relief Fund is in Trouble — Here’s Why It’s a Good Thing

United Nations Round-Up: Iran Heads Human Rights Council Assembly, Fails to Condemn Hamas

Women’s Rights Groups Silent on Hamas Sexual Violence, Analysis Shows

Senator Releases Annual ‘Festivus Report’ Chronicling $1 Trillion in Government Waste