From Population Control to Global Planning

How Billionaires Made Population Policy a Thing

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In a memo dated August 1, 1969, Paul Todd Jr., then-Chief Executive Officer of Planned Parenthood of America, congratulated John D. Rockefeller III on the triumph of a population control message making it into President Nixon’s speech to Congress. Todd called it a “pure distillation of Rockefeller-Cohen.” And he wasn’t wrong. The carefully engineered public policy push that began years earlier had finally broken through into official U.S. policy—and it didn’t just happen. This was not a grassroots movement. This was an elite-engineered campaign, built by people with money, power, and access to the machinery of government.

And the documentation for it comes from a surprising source: the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR), a publication founded by Lyndon LaRouche, one of the more controversial political operators of the late 20th century. LaRouche was a fringe figure who ran for president eight times and built a media and intelligence-gathering network that aimed to expose what he saw as globalist conspiracies. Whether you agree with his politics or not, the EIR archives are packed with primary sources and reporting that map the infrastructure of elite influence—including the birth control agenda backed by major U.S. foundations.

The Population Bomb and the Billionaire Backers

Starting in 1961, Hugh Moore—the paper cup magnate turned anti-population crusader—funded massive ad campaigns warning of a looming "population bomb." His goal was to whip up mass anxiety and create the pressure necessary to steer U.S. foreign and domestic policy toward what he saw as a rational solution: fewer births. This overlapped perfectly with the goals of John D. Rockefeller III and General William Draper. Draper, a military man and investment banker, chaired the Eisenhower-era Draper Committee, officially known as the President's Committee to Study the United States Military Assistance Program. Although its stated purpose was to evaluate military aid, the Draper Committee’s final report in 1959 included recommendations that population growth in developing countries posed a strategic threat to U.S. security interests.

Draper and others used this platform to link demography with geopolitical risk, laying the groundwork for future U.S. involvement in international family planning initiatives. He later led the Population Crisis Committee (PCC), using his deep Rolodex of Rockefeller Foundation and CIA alumni to embed population control into foreign aid policy. From the 1960s onward, they were remarkably successful. Draper and Rockefeller’s people briefed lawmakers. They ghostwrote legislation. They got State Department officials like Dean Rusk to bring the idea of “family planning as foreign aid” to the UN, even drafting Kennedy-era speeches.

By the mid-1960s, with the Johnson administration onboard, the U.S. government was financing birth control programs worldwide through the Agency for International Development (AID). In just a few years, funding ballooned from a few million to hundreds of millions, with much of it funneled through the United Nations, Planned Parenthood, and Rockefeller's own Population Council. Make no mistake: this was not humanitarian aid. This was strategic population reduction disguised as development policy. And it wasn't a secret. In fact, they were proud of it.

The PR Blitz and Manufactured Consent

Outside the halls of government, Moore and Draper were building the narrative. They created an organization called The Campaign To Check the Population Explosion, buying out 40 million impressions worth of alarmist ads. Think: “Overpopulation = Starvation, War, and Collapse.” Pure psychological warfare. They funded Paul Ehrlich’s infamous book The Population Bomb, and by 1971, the organization Zero Population Growth (ZPG) had 30,000 dues-paying members, with Ehrlich as its prophet. These weren’t just books and pamphlets—they were ideological weapons.

In 1969, Nixon's presidential address on population was essentially a Rockefeller committee report in disguise. It laid the groundwork for the 1970 Commission on Population Growth and the American Future—with John D. Rockefeller III as chair. The Commission’s 1972 report solidified the campaign’s victory. Twenty years after founding the Population Council, Rockefeller had made ZPG a national—and soon, global—policy objective.

The United Nations: From Development to Depopulation

By 1974, Rockefeller took his show global again. The United Nations World Population Conference in Bucharest served as his platform to push population reduction not just as a national priority, but as a human destiny. The message: fewer people, better planet. Critics called it genocide with a smile. And behind it all? Not just one family. It was a coordinated network of billionaires, bureaucrats, think tanks, and intelligence operatives. AID, World Bank, UNFPA, and a revolving door of Rockefeller grantees ensured continuity between so-called "humanitarian development" and the sterilization of the world’s poorest. It wasn't just about birth control. It was about control, full stop.

From Blueprint to Reality: The System They Built Still Governs Us

This isn't ancient history. It’s the blueprint. From today’s debates about reproductive rights, global health, climate policy, and bioethics, you can trace a straight line back to this carefully architected campaign. They told you they wanted to save the world. What they built was a global machine to decide who gets born. Whatever you think about Lyndon LaRouche, his publication EIR left a dense paper trail on this topic. And once you start reading it, it becomes clear: this didn’t just happen. It was planned, financed, and executed. And its architecture still defines the world we live in.