NR senior editor Charlie Cooke smartly opined that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was unfit for purpose because of PBS and NPR’s obvious left-wing orientation, and thereby unworthy of public funding. “I have no interest in helping to fund media organizations. But if we are going to have them, they should not be filled with people who openly despise around 70 percent of the country. Private institutions do not need to be representative. Government institutions do. And NPR and PBS are not.”

The principle makes sense: A public entity must not stand for things that a broad swath of the citizenry, who are forced to pay for it, does not support. The same reasoning supports Congress’s defunding of a far more “public” entity than the Corporation for Public Broadcasting: Planned Parenthood.

Yes, CPB was created via an act of Congress while Planned Parenthood is an ostensibly private entity. Yet Planned Parenthood was receiving more money, and a greater percentage of its revenue, from taxpayers than CPB was. As a practical matter, Planned Parenthood was far more “public” than PBS or NPR.

Prior to the rescission bill, CPB was set to receive a $535 million federal allocation, which would have been split to help fund PBS and NPR stations throughout the country. Planned Parenthood, meanwhile, was receiving $700 million in federal funding per year.

Planned Parenthood was also more reliant on federal funding than PBS or NPR were. Roughly 12.9 percent of revenues to NPR or PBS stations came from CPB’s federal allocation of taxpayer funds. Based on an examination of the federal tax documents of Planned Parenthood’s regional affiliates (the nonprofit corporations that run their clinics), more than a third of their $1.7 billion in 2023 revenue was coming from Medicaid and other federal programs, along with even more money from state governments. In short, Planned Parenthood is far more “public” than NPR or PBS in the most basic sense: money, and reliance on that money.

This reliance is more apparent now that funding is being withdrawn. Planned Parenthood Mar Monte, the nation’s largest Planned Parenthood affiliate, just announced that it is closing five of its 33 California locations, after massively slashing the San Jose-based executive staff. Affiliates throughout the country are announcing similar closures. Planned Parenthood is so heavily reliant on federal funding, particularly in California, that, as I predicted, it is going to have to massively downsize its operations just to sustain the impact of a single year without federal funding.

A recent Marist poll shows that 57 percent of Americans oppose federal funding for abortion. Planned Parenthood performs 400,000 abortions per year only because it participates in the Medicaid program, forcing federal taxpayers to pay for its provision of non-abortion services. One year without it, and the whole edifice begins to crumble.

Participation in Medicaid is a privilege, not a right. A partisan entity (Planned Parenthood’s political branches spent $40 million, only for Democrats, in the 2024 election cycle) whose raison d’être is inimical to half the country is, quite simply, unfit for purpose as a major recipient of taxpayer support, whether created by Congress or not.