After 26 hours of debate, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held their ground against efforts to force taxpayers to fund big abortion businesses. The Committee’s inclusion of 10-year protections against these efforts marks a historic moment for the pro-life movement, building on goals to cut government waste and counter anti-family agendas in reconciliation.
In the making of President Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill,” Congressional committees have been hard at work crafting individual bills under committee-specific instructions that will algin policies with the final budget resolution. The bill will only require 51 votes in the Senate to pass, so this process called “budget reconciliation” is an opportunity for the majority party to achieve budget-related goals that would not normally pass the Senate’s 60-vote threshold.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s proposed text notably protects all taxpayer dollars from funding big abortion businesses. Previous policy forced taxpayers to funnel nearly $800M to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest abortion provider, in 2024 alone. Protecting American taxpayers from funding these harmful clinics has been a decades-long fight for conservatives and pro-life members of Congress, and this year’s reconciliation package seems to provide a historic opportunity to finally do so.
However, House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee sought to remove this portion of the bill by offering an amendment during the bill’s 26-hour-long markup. They claimed businesses like Planned Parenthood already cannot directly receive federal funds for abortion, but as Congresswoman Erin Houchin (R-Indiana-9th) pointed out in debate, “You can’t pour water into only one part of the bucket.”
Money is fungible. Every dollar they do not spend keeping the lights on, they use to subsidize abortion and further fuel their political action efforts. In this previous election cycle, Planned Parenthood Action boasted nearly $70M of political spending, showing they certainly do not need their clinics’ finances to rest on the backs of American taxpayers.
Republicans unified against the efforts to force taxpayer funding of these organizations and defeated the amendment 24-28 in committee. They also prohibited the use of taxpayer funds for “gender transition procedures” on minors.
Energy and Commerce will now recommend their final proposal to the Budget Committee where it will package all of the bills into one bill and send it to the House Floor for a full vote. Republicans hold a starkly narrow vote majority in the Lower Chamber. It will take nearly unilateral support to pass the final budget.
As House members consider all spending measures, reach out to your representative and ask her/him to prioritize stopping public funds going towards businesses that perform abortions: https://www.votervoice.net/CWFA/Campaigns/122511/Respond.