Alliance Defending Freedom is urging the Department of Health and Human Services to withdraw federal funding from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a professional medical association that actively promotes abortion and other left-wing causes.
The conservative, Christian legal advocacy group argued its request aligns with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again vision and, more broadly, the Trump administration’s mission to eliminate wasteful spending.
Beyond abortion, ACOG is accused of pushing gender ideology and diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. All three left-wing issues are targeted in separate executive orders signed by President Donald Trump.
Elective abortions, for instance, are no longer being funded by federal taxpayer dollars after Trump enforced the Hyde Amendment.
“For far too long, previous administrations have weaponized HHS for political purposes. They advanced dangerous gender ideology, racial discrimination in the form of DEI, and mandates that promote abortions and violate conscience. Key to this radical agenda has been HHS funding to ACOG,” Matthew Bowman, ADF director of regulatory practice, wrote in a Thursday letter to HHS officials.
Bowman went on to argue that ACOG is continuing to undermine the Trump administration after the medical group entered into funding agreements with the Biden and Obama administrations lasting several years. The lawyer cited two programs that award ACOG millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.
The first program, named the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health, allocates $15 million to the medical association to make online content and podcasts about DEI, gender ideology, and abortion advocacy. For example, the AIM for Safer Birth Podcast promotes critical race theory books, like Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy, and its website advocates for abortions and gender transitions.
The website is fully funded by the Health Resources and Services Administration, an agency that falls under HHS.
The second source of funding is found in HHS cooperative agreements that enable ACOG to perform a basic function that HRSA staff should be capable of handling: to “periodically update the women’s preventive services insurance coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act,” the letter states. The association has brought in more than $7 million through these agreements.
Taxpayer dollars should not be used to let ACOG do HRSA’s own job, ADF says.
“The Biden and Obama administrations tried to tie the hands of President Trump’s HHS by entering multiyear funding agreements with ACOG and other radical organizations spanning much of President Trump’s terms in office,” he wrote. “ACOG’s funding must end.”
In a press release published in late March, ACOG lambasted HHS’s decision to terminate thousands of federal employees as an “attack on public health.”
HHS leadership laid off some 10,000 workers as part of an effort to save $1.8 billion per year, the department said in a statement two weeks ago. An additional 10,000 employees left either through voluntary separation or early retirement, downsizing the department’s workforce from about 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees.
“ACOG cannot carry out cooperative agreements—under which it is supposed to be implementing HHS’s agenda—when it denounces HHS’s agenda in the strongest terms,” Bowman said.
In addition to the request for withdrawing federal funding, ADF asks HHS to open a civil compliance investigation to determine whether ACOG violated the law by using the funding agreements to promote DEI.
HHS did not respond to National Review’s request for comment, and ACOG declined to comment on the letter.