August 31, 2024
The Democrats have their sights set on a lot of established checks and balances if they obtain power in November. They’ve threatened to pack the U.S. Supreme Court, they’ve threatened to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, and there is continued talk about getting rid of the Hyde Amendment – as there has been for years.
From the Atlantic, “For nearly 50 years, the Hyde Amendment has been considered an unassailable fixture of the United States budget. Although the original amendment applied only to Medicaid, Hyde’s restrictions now extend to other programs, including Medicare, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, and the Indian Health Service. To many of its supporters, the amendment serves as both a guard against taxpayers funding abortions and a broad-brush check on abortion access.”
These guardrails are questionably a good thing. And because abortion funding infiltrates multiple budgets, many other mechanisms and tools have been used to cut abortion industry access to taxpayer funds. The Heritage Foundation describes them as follows:
- “The Helms Amendment(1973) that restricts foreign aid funds from being expended on abortions;
- “The Smith Amendment (1983) that prohibits funding elective abortions in the Federal Employee Health Benefits program;
- “The Dornan Amendment (1989) that prohibits funding elective abortions within Washington, D.C.; and
- “The Weldon Amendment (2004) that protects health care providers from discrimination on the basis of their refusal to provide and pay for abortions or refer women to have them. The Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights enforces the Weldon Amendment.”
But what happens if all this goes away? What would a post-Hyde amendment world look like for the government – would a new department dedicated to abortion get created? Would abortion become even more incentivized to get taxpayer funding?
The problems start with the data.
First and foremost, there is no national reporting law in America when it comes to abortion and never has been. And some states like California don’t track any data. Two organizations – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Guttmacher Institute – try to measure this, but they use different methods and publish different figures.
The data would be incomplete and unreliable – but that’s never stopped the government before. And if you want a glimpse at that potential horror show – the U.S. Department of Abortion Services or whatever may happen – you need only look at the abysmal track record on the U.S. government when it comes to data tracking and money distribution.
DATA ERRORS
The government continuously makes critical mistakes when it comes to data. Just recently, the Department of Labor did a massive about face on its jobs data. According to reporting from the Washington Times, “The Labor Department reported that between early 2023 and early 2024 monthly job figures were overstated. The agency said the U.S. economy added 818,000 fewer jobs than previously stated, which was the biggest downward change since the financial crisis in 2009.”
Even in 2017, the government was earning terrible grades for spending data accuracy, according to reporting by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO). “Agencies struggled most with accuracy. According to the audits only 11 agencies, about one in four, submitted accurate spending information. Most of those agencies were smaller offices like the Federal Labor Relations Authority and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.”
Now, who’s to say similarly bad reporting errors won’t happen with something as important as abortion data? An overrepresentation in the numbers would almost certainly result in more funding for organizations like Planned Parenthood – and they already get too much money as it is.
READ: Blood Money: Our Federal Tax Dollars Support Abortion
MONEY ERRORS
And the government’s track record on money transfers and management is just as dismal. The examples speak for themselves.
In FY 2023, the government made over $236 billion in improper payments – those are qualified as overpayments, underpayments, unknown payments, or a payment that failed to follow rules or regulations. But it gets worse – every year since 2009 there has been at least $100 billion in these kinds of money mishaps. Over the last 15 years, that’s totaled over $2 trillion in wasted or mishandled money.
Just last week, the government “accidentally” transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban in Afghanistan. Yes, that Taliban. But that’s in addition to the money that the U.S. State Department has already sent to Afghanistan despite swearing that it wouldn’t wind up in the hands of the brutal theocratic regime.
The Pentagon has failed its audit every year for the last six years. It has also lost track of more than $1 billion of gear and assets procured for Ukraine.
Are you getting the picture yet?
The reality is that the government can’t be trusted to do something as basic as manage money well for things that are their responsibility – like national defense or domestic programs. So how could we expect them to handle something like abortion which would fall completely outside of their normal operating purview?
The results, so far, speak for themselves.
