For Immediate Release:	November 16, 2006
For More Information:	Maxwell Ciardullo, SIECUS, (212) 819-9770 x 325
Sponsor Organization:	SIECUS
Non-Partisan Government Accountability Office Report Documents Bush Administration’s Abstinence-Only Programs Running Amuck With Over One Billion in Taxpayer Dollars
Washington, D.C. – With the election over and new leadership taking over Congress in January, a new report today from the non-partisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) adds additional evidence that the previous Congress failed to hold the Bush Administration accountable for taxpayer money going to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. The report documents the actions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to deliver abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, all with very little oversight and few mechanisms to measure the effectiveness of the programs. The report was done at the request of several Members of Congress concerned about the administration of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which over the past decade have received more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds. The vast amount of funds for these programs, which are forbidden from discussing the benefits of condoms and contraception in preventing teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including HIV, has been funneled to right-wing groups favored by the Bush Administration. The GAO report uncovers a near total absence of oversight to ensure that funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are not providing medically inaccurate information. In fact, according to the report, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the division of HHS responsible for the vast majority of the programs, admitted that no such oversight is in place. This absence of accountability follows almost two years after a report from Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) found that more than two thirds of the curricula most commonly used in federally funded abstinence-only-until-marriage programs contained serious medical inaccuracies, including misinformation about HIV, other STDs, and the effectiveness of condoms. To date, HHS has made no changes to the reviewed programs and, despite the evidence, denies that any problems with the curricula exist. “It is increasingly clear that the Administration for Children and Families’ strategy is to bury their heads in the sand and simply throw money at organizations that favor the social issue agenda of the Bush Administration,” said William Smith, vice president for public policy at SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States. “One has to question if ACF is acting more like a rich, cash-drunk uncle rather than in its proper role as a protector of our nation’s health,” Smith continued. The GAO also reported on ACF’s total lack of appropriate and customary measurements to determine if funded programs are actually working. ACF took over the administration of these programs in 2001 and promptly gutted evidence-based measures such as determining whether programs reduced teen pregnancy rates. In their place, ACF now only asks grantees to provide non-health based measures, such as how many young people were in the program and the number of hours the program operated. “The GAO report shows that the emperor has no clothes: ACF may be within our Department of Health and Human Services but it is not about public health,” said Smith. “With more than a billion dollars having been frivolously spent and without any evidence that these programs are effective in helping our nation’s young people, every American should decry this cover-up of politics and ideology masquerading as public health. It is time for the new U.S. Congress to step in and either institute the oversight that the Bush Administration refuses to provide or suspend the program’s funding until accountability is brought to the program’s administration.” To view the full report, please go to: http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-07-87 - ### -