John­son wants ‘con­sen­sus’ on cut­ting fund­ing for Planned Par­ent­hood and PBS

Dur­ing an inter­view with Fox News host Martha Mac­Cal­lum on Wednes­day, John­son detailed some of his hopes to scale back “the admin­is­tra­tive state,” which the incom­ing Trump admin­is­tra­tion is tar­get­ing through the new Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy. 

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“Two spe­cif­ic exam­ples: Planned Par­ent­hood and PBS are in con­gres­sion­al con­trol. Are you plan­ning to axe both of those?” Mac­Cal­lum ques­tioned. 

“I would like to. That’s for sure,” John­son replied before adding that, “we have got to build con­sen­sus to have the votes to do that.” 

“Where Con­gress is involved — that’s where it takes the hard work leg­isla­tive­ly, get­ting every­body on the same page. So there’ll be lots of ideas that come out. We don’t want to put too many of it out right now, OK, but this is part of that prepar­ing the play­book to unleash and unroll in Jan­u­ary,” he con­tin­ued. 

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Both orga­ni­za­tions, which Repub­li­cans have been his­tor­i­cal­ly apt to crit­i­cize, receive mil­lions of dol­lars of fed­er­al fund­ing each year. 

John­son, along with oth­er social con­ser­v­a­tives, has long con­demned Planned Par­ent­hood, par­tic­u­lar­ly for the mil­lions of abor­tions it pro­vides every year. 

Planned Par­ent­hood per­formed 374,155 abor­tions between 2021 and 2022, receiv­ing $670.4 mil­lion in gov­ern­ment fund­ing dur­ing that peri­od. It also pro­vides an array of oth­er health­care ser­vices, includ­ing can­cer screen­ings and pre­ven­tive treat­ments.

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Social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tions such as the Char­lotte Lozi­er Insti­tute have argued that many of its health ser­vices are down. Breast exams were down 74% since 2010, and con­tra­cep­tive ser­vices were down 36%, accord­ing to an analy­sis of Planned Parenthood’s 2021–2022 report.  

Repub­li­cans have also often tar­get­ed the Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Ser­vice, a news orga­ni­za­tion that was estab­lished after Pres­i­dent Lyn­don John­son signed the Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing Act of 1967. 

PBS is among the news orga­ni­za­tions that receive a frac­tion of the Cor­po­ra­tion for Pub­lic Broad­cast­ing (CPB) $500 mil­lion fed­er­al tax dol­lars annu­al­ly. 

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PBS pro­vides edu­ca­tion­al, cul­tur­al, and sci­en­tif­ic pro­gram­ming to pub­lic tele­vi­sion sta­tions across the coun­try, with fed­er­al fund­ing account­ing for approx­i­mate­ly 15% of its total bud­get. 

Con­ser­v­a­tives have argued the news orga­ni­za­tion pro­vides biased cov­er­age, point­ing to a recent analy­sis by the Media Research Cen­ter, a con­ser­v­a­tive media watch­dog, to back up their claims.  When look­ing at PBS’s cov­er­age of the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tion, 88% of PBS’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the event was favor­able, com­pared to its 72% neg­a­tive cov­er­age of the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion. 

When pressed on Wednes­day about how Repub­li­cans hope to car­ry out plans to slash these pro­grams and more amid push­back from donors and lob­by­ists, John­son replied that the recent elec­tion results have changed things up in Wash­ing­ton. 

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“You’re going to have a pres­i­dent that’s bold enough to do it,” he said, com­par­ing Pres­i­dent-elect Don­ald Trump’s incom­ing admin­is­tra­tion to Argen­tin­ian Pres­i­dent Javier Milei’s recent sweep­ing reforms in the Latin Amer­i­can coun­try.

“You know, we have our own ver­sion of the Argen­tin­ian overnight, with Don­ald Trump…we do have to scale back the size of scope of gov­ern­ment, so it serves the people…here we have, what I think Martha, is a gen­er­a­tional oppor­tu­ni­ty to make real trans­for­ma­tion­al change to the admin­is­tra­tive state, the deep state. We want to take a blow­torch to the reg­u­la­to­ry state,” John­son said, adding that he believes “what Elon and Vivek have in mind can help us in that regard.”

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy lead the new DOGE depart­ment that was cre­at­ed by Trump to trim the size of gov­ern­ment short­ly after he won a sec­ond term in the White House.

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John­son will work close­ly with the two men, as well as Greene, to car­ry out his goals of slash­ing gov­ern­ment spend­ing, includ­ing on orga­ni­za­tions such as Planned Par­ent­hood and PBS. 

“House and Sen­ate Repub­li­cans look for­ward to host­ing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy tomor­row to dis­cuss how the Depart­ment of Gov­ern­ment Effi­cien­cy can help us get it done,” he con­tin­ued.