Following up on an item from earlier this week, it’s bad enough when the Bush administration awards tax dollars to abstinence-only programs that don’t work. It’s worse when our money goes to far-right abstinence groups based on their political connections.
And it’s even worse still when these same abstinence groups get more money than they even asked for. Murray Waas and ABC News have the story.
An organization that promotes sexual abstinence for teens received a federal grant of over a million dollars, twice what it had requested, despite the skepticism Department of Justice staffers had about the group and the fact that it refused to participate in a congressionally mandated study.
So why did the Best Friends Foundation receive the grant from the Justice Department’s juvenile justice office even though dozens of competing organizations were rated higher by the office’s own reviewers? Current and former staffers say it was because of Best Friends’ powerful president and founder, Elayne Bennett.
Not only is Bennett the wife of Bill Bennett, a former Reagan and Bush administration official and conservative political commentator, but she is also personally close to the chief administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), J. Robert Flores.
The closer one looks at this, the worse it appears.
Bennett’s “Best Friends” program had withdrawn from a congressionally mandated examination on the efficacy of abstinence programs, which hardly should have qualified the group for a Justice Department grant. For that matter, when DOJ officials conducted a review and ranked organizations competing for the grants, “Best Friends” ranked 53rd out of 104.
And yet, the group not only was bumped to the head of the line, but ended up with twice as much public funding as it had requested in the first place.
Wait, it get worse.
[B]ecause of Best Friends’ lower ranking, 53rd out of 104 grant applicants considered, [Flores’] superiors might have overruled him, if they knew of the group’s poor standing, according to Justice Department officials involved in the process.
To make sure that a grant to Best Friends was approved, officials say, Flores simply created an entirely whole new category which the organization’s grant proposal would be considered.
The category, Flores wrote in a memo to then-Assistant Attorney General Regina Schofield, who oversaw the awarding of Justice Department contracts and grants was for grantees “utilizing school based outreach efforts directed at preventing high-risk activity (out-of-wedlock pregnancy).”
Flores went on to write Schofield regarding Best Friend’s proposal: “This application has the highest score that met the criteria under the administrator’s priority area.”
What Flores left out of the memo was that Best Friends had the highest score because by manipulating the categories, Best Friends was the only organization that qualified at all in that particular category.
Former OJJDP staffer Scott Peterson, who resigned in frustration, concluded of the grant for Best Friends, “The administrator made sure the fix was in on this one.”
To reiterate a point from the other day, what’s striking is how almost routine stories like this have become over the last few years. We start to think of corruption in the federal government as the norm. We hear that Bush administration agencies tasked with distributing grants (made up of our tax dollars) are basing decisions on ideology and politics instead of merit, and think, “Well, sure. Of course they are.”
Only 220 days until we can, hopefully, start to have some confidence in the executive branch again.