During an interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Wednesday, Johnson detailed some of his hopes to scale back “the administrative state,” which the incoming Trump administration is targeting through the new Department of Government Efficiency. 

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“Two specific examples: Planned Parenthood and PBS are in congressional control. Are you planning to axe both of those?” MacCallum questioned. 

“I would like to. That’s for sure,” Johnson replied before adding that, “we have got to build consensus to have the votes to do that.” 

“Where Congress is involved — that’s where it takes the hard work legislatively, getting everybody on the same page. So there’ll be lots of ideas that come out. We don’t want to put too many of it out right now, OK, but this is part of that preparing the playbook to unleash and unroll in January,” he continued. 

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Both organizations, which Republicans have been historically apt to criticize, receive millions of dollars of federal funding each year. 

Johnson, along with other social conservatives, has long condemned Planned Parenthood, particularly for the millions of abortions it provides every year. 

Planned Parenthood performed 374,155 abortions between 2021 and 2022, receiving $670.4 million in government funding during that period. It also provides an array of other healthcare services, including cancer screenings and preventive treatments.

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Socially conservative organizations such as the Charlotte Lozier Institute have argued that many of its health services are down. Breast exams were down 74% since 2010, and contraceptive services were down 36%, according to an analysis of Planned Parenthood’s 2021-2022 report.  

Republicans have also often targeted the Public Broadcasting Service, a news organization that was established after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. 

PBS is among the news organizations that receive a fraction of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) $500 million federal tax dollars annually. 

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PBS provides educational, cultural, and scientific programming to public television stations across the country, with federal funding accounting for approximately 15% of its total budget. 

Conservatives have argued the news organization provides biased coverage, pointing to a recent analysis by the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog, to back up their claims.  When looking at PBS’s coverage of the Democratic National Convention, 88% of PBS’s characterization of the event was favorable, compared to its 72% negative coverage of the Republican National Convention. 

When pressed on Wednesday about how Republicans hope to carry out plans to slash these programs and more amid pushback from donors and lobbyists, Johnson replied that the recent election results have changed things up in Washington. 

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“You’re going to have a president that’s bold enough to do it,” he said, comparing President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration to Argentinian President Javier Milei’s recent sweeping reforms in the Latin American country.

“You know, we have our own version of the Argentinian overnight, with Donald Trump…we do have to scale back the size of scope of government, so it serves the people…here we have, what I think Martha, is a generational opportunity to make real transformational change to the administrative state, the deep state. We want to take a blowtorch to the regulatory state,” Johnson said, adding that he believes “what Elon and Vivek have in mind can help us in that regard.”

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy lead the new DOGE department that was created by Trump to trim the size of government shortly after he won a second term in the White House.

Johnson will work closely with the two men, as well as Greene, to carry out his goals of slashing government spending, including on organizations such as Planned Parenthood and PBS. 

“House and Senate Republicans look forward to hosting Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy tomorrow to discuss how the Department of Government Efficiency can help us get it done,” he continued.