The Department of Health and Human Services will direct the Office of Management and Budget to aggressively ensure Title 10 family planning funds are not given to programs which perform abortion, a Trump administration official said in a Thursday statement.
“HHS will file with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) a proposal to update the regulations governing the Title X program to ensure compliance with the program’s statutory prohibition on taxpayer funding of programs where abortion is a method of family planning,” the official said.
The official explained that “the proposal would require a bright line of physical as well as financial separation between Title X programs and any program (or facility) where abortion is performed, supported, or referred for as a method of family planning.” The official noted that the proposal does not necessarily cut federal funding to Planned Parenthood, “as long as they’re willing to disentangle taxpayer funds from abortion as a method of family planning, which is required by the Title X law.”
The Title 10 program offers hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance to family planning organizations. The proposal has long been sought by conservative lawmakers in Congress. Several Republican lawmakers recently wrote to the Department of Health and Human services saying, “to ensure that the federally funded family planning services offered by Title X grant recipients are unquestionably separate and distinct from abortion, Title X service sites should be physically, as well as financially, separate from facilities that provide abortion.”
The Trump administration’s proposal would reverse an Obama administration regulation prohibiting states from withholding Title 10 funds from Planned Parenthood.