An amendment from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would have modified a funding bill for the Department of Veterans Affairs to block the usage of funds for abortion or abortion-related services is now listed online as withdrawn.
In line with that designation, the amendment didn’t appear to make it out of committee, considering a report from the Rules Committee accompanying a meeting where the proposal could have been considered doesn’t list the amendment as among those made in order. In other words, it appears the withdrawal was made before the consideration at committee would have taken place. Her proposal would have blocked “funding from being used or transferred to another federal agency for abortion or abortion-related services,” a summary from the Rules Committee explained. No explanation for the amendment’s withdrawal was made available at that juncture, and in theory, Greene could attempt to propose something similar in the future.
Recently, the support made available at the Defense Department for military personnel seeking an abortion has been a point of major contention, with Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) objecting to and blocking hundreds upon hundreds of military nominations and promotions in protest of the Pentagon policy. This support specifically covers travel expenses that may be incurred by personnel seeking an abortion, who are now facing a patchwork of access to those procedures after Republican-led states moved to take advantage of the allowances left by the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe.
In another seemingly abandoned proposal, Greene had moved for the stripping of tens of millions in funding for an office at the VA that deals with issues like claims of assault and harassment, claiming the team to be a harbinger of so-called woke ideologies in connection to the tie to diversity and inclusion made in its name. This proposal is also listed online as withdrawn.
