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The Trump administration on Tuesday began withholding tens of millions in federal funding from Planned Parenthood and other health-care providers, a move that will curtail access to services including cancer screenings and affordable birth control.
On Monday, Planned Parenthood said nine of its affiliates had received notice from the administration that it would withhold funding from Title X, the nationwide family-planning program. Since 1970, Title X has provided federal funding to health centers for family planning aid and reproductive health care, including birth control and other nonabortion services - including about $286 million in the 2024 fiscal year.
In total, Title X funding is being withheld from 16 organizations while the Department of Health and Human Services, which provides the awards for the program, investigates "possible violations of their grant terms," the agency said in a statement to The Washington Post on Tuesday. Experts say the funding freeze will imperil low-income and uninsured or underinsured people who have relied on clinics funded by the half-century-old program from getting affordable health care. The freeze leaves seven states with no Title X funding as of Tuesday, according to the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association, which represents publicly funded family planning organizations around the nation.
Clare Coleman, president of the association, said the move sends Title X, which she described as a "public health success story," into disarray.
"It shows a profound misunderstanding of what the Title X program was intended to do by Congress," Coleman said.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment Monday night.
The administration's move to cut funding was first reported by the Wall Street Journal last week before Planned Parenthood announced it publicly Monday. Officials planned to freeze the funding while they investigated whether any of it had been used for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Journal reported.
An HHS spokesperson said Tuesday that the agency would evaluate how Title X awards were used against federal measures, including a February executive order President Donald Trump signed to cut federal funding from programs he said were giving benefits to immigrants in the country illegally. Proof of U.S. citizenship is not required to receive care under Title X.
"They may be pursuing an ideological goal of this administration, but the real-life impact on people who need care and who rely on these community-based health-care centers is just going to be horrific and devastating," Coleman said.
Of Planned Parenthood's 40 Title X-funded affiliates, which operate around 300 health centers in the country, the nine that received notice include: Planned Parenthood Association of Utah; Planned Parenthood Greater Texas Family Planning; Planned Parenthood Great Northwest, Hawaii, Alaska, Indiana, Kentucky; Planned Parenthood Greater Ohio; Planned Parenthood North Central States; Planned Parenthood Northern New England for New Hampshire; Planned Parenthood South Atlantic; Planned Parenthood Southern New England for Connecticut; and Virginia League of Planned Parenthood Virginia.
The administration is withholding about $21 million in funding from the Planned Parenthood affiliates. Between all the organizations affected, nearly $66 million in funding is now stagnant, according to the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association's preliminary data. The seven states now without Title X funding - meaning all of the centers in that state that receive grants from the program have had them withheld - are California, Hawaii, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Missouri and Utah; and the freeze partially affects funding in 14 additional states, the group said.
Trump has targeted health-care providers via Title X before.
In 2019, during his first term, his administration altered the half-century-old program. The administration instituted what abortion providers called a "gag rule," banning clinics that received Title X aid from referring patients for abortions. As a result, Planned Parenthood exited the Title X program instead of complying with the restrictions. The organization rejoined the program in 2021 after President Joe Biden reversed the rules.
The new loss of funding would mean "cancers go undetected, access to birth control is severely reduced, and the nation's STI crisis worsens," said Alexis McGill Johnson, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
"President Trump and Elon Musk are pushing their dangerous political agenda, stripping health care access from people nationwide, and not giving a second thought to the devastation they will cause," Johnson said in a statement Monday.
Federally funded programs such as Title X are crucial in providing access to affordable reproductive health care, said Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.
Of the approximately 25 million women who receive contraceptive care annually, 18 percent receive it from publicly supported clinics, including Title X-funded centers, she said.
Beyond Title X, Planned Parenthood receives funding from other federal grants and programs, including Medicaid. In 2023, the organization received 34 percent of its revenue from government health services reimbursements, according to its annual report from that year.
For years, Republican lawmakers and antiabortion groups have pushed for the defunding of Planned Parenthood. Trump promised during his first campaign to remove the organization from Title X, and the issue resurfaced on the trail last year.
In October, Vice President JD Vance said that if Trump were elected to a second term, he would move to end federal funding to the organization, saying that the campaign did not "think that taxpayers should fund late-term abortions."
In a statement March 25, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington) said that by withholding Title X funding, "this administration is putting women's lives at risk yet again and ripping away the ability of women with the tightest budgets to get the basic reproductive health care they need to control their lives and futures."