Looking back at the Watergate scandal, it wasn’t just the break-in or the subsequent cover up that did Nixon in. One of the main problems Congress discovered — and wrote articles of impeachment over — was that Nixon was misusing federal agencies to punish his political enemies. It was an abuse of power of historic proportions.
Keep that in mind when you read the fascinating Salon.com article today on the federal audits of “abstinence only” programs. (If you’re not a subscriber, you can get a free day pass if you’re so inclined)
Salon’s Christopher Healy notes, for example, that Advocates for Youth has been around for 18 years providing young people with accurate information on sex education. It had never been the subject of a government audit.
Six months into Bush’s term, the Washington Post published a leaked memo from the Department of Health and Human Services in which Advocates for Youth was described as “ardent critics of the Bush administration” after the group publicly criticized the administration’s global “gag rule” that prohibited federal funding to foreign agencies that performed or facilitated abortions.
Since then, however, Advocates for Youth has become the subject of three audits in less than a year — one by the Centers for Disease Control back in October 2002, a second by the General Accounting Office in early 2003, and the third just two months ago, by a different arm of the CDC.
Could this be a coincidence? Sure. In fact, I’m not much for conspiracy theories. When one usually scratches the surface of these theories, there’s usually just coincidence and paranoia underneath.
But the Salon story seems to have some depth, not just because of the Advocates for Youth story, but because there are similar groups facing similar scrutiny.
As Salon noted, the CDC has also conducted three reviews in the past 10 months of San Francisco’s STOP AIDS program in an effort to make sure that none of its federal grant dollars have gone toward funding workshops that may promote sexual activity. Moreover, a group called Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) has been audited twice this year (its first audits ever, despite a decade of receiving federal grants).
What’s that old saying? Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, three times is a trend?
It’s an interesting read. Be sure to take a look.