The Trump administration slashed funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs last year, with some grantees only hearing that their funding had been cut from the media. It looked like a move by Trump political appointees with extremist abstinence-only views, and guess what—it was.
Democracy Forward is suing over the funding cut, and is arguing that the Department of Health and Human Services “violated the Administrative Procedure Act that bars arbitrary decision-making and that the political appointees thwarted the will of Congress.” Internal notes and emails show that career staffers who’d been guiding the program to success at preventing teen pregnancy were cut out of the decision-making process:
In the notes provided to NBC News, Evelyn Kappeler, who for eight years has led the Office of Adolescent Health, which administers the program, repeatedly expressed concerns about terminating the program, but appeared out of the decision-making loop and at one point was driven to tears.
In a July 17, 2017 note, she says she was admonished to “get in line” and told it was not her place to ask questions about the agency’s use of funds. In a July 28 note, Kappeler recalled she was “frustrated about the time this process is taking and the fact that (her staff) has not been part of the discussions.” She described being “so rattled” that “my reaction when I got on (sic) the phone was to cry.”
She and her staff “were not aware of the grant action until the last minute” — an apparent reference to the decision, it says.
This was Trump political appointees—or, as Kelly Macias described them—“a bunch of vulgar morons with retrograde views” all along. Screw the program’s success at preventing teen pregnancy, the abstinence-only crowd wouldn’t have it. So more teens will get pregnant and then the Trump administration will do everything possible to force them to have children, only to deny them health care and food aid. Impoverished motherhood is what Republicans want for America’s teen girls, and that means poverty for their children, too.