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Trump Cuts Funding For Teen Pregnancy Prevention Groups

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President Donald Trump’s administration has quietly moved to eliminate a nationwide, successful teen pregnancy prevention program in its proposed FY 2018 budget. All organizations getting funding have been notified that they will no longer receive any by next year.

The budget seeks to end Teen Pregnancy Prevention, or TPP, two years earlier than expected, cutting $213.6 million to more than 81 TPP organizations, says the Department of Health and Human Services.

“On July 1, HHS awarded 81 continuations for Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program Tier 1 and Tier 2 grant awards for a total of $89 million,” a spokesperson announced in a report by UPI.

All of these grantees were given a project end date of June 30, 2018.

The Obama administration awarded 84 grants to communities across the United States to fund TPP in 2010. The program is a national, evidence-based effort that funnels money to different organizations that work to prevent teen pregnancy. TPP is part of the Office of Adolescent Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

As a project, TPP focused on preventing pregnancy among adolescents ages 10 to 19. During its first five years, 102 grantees were able to reach half a million teens, trained over 6,800 professionals, and partnered with more than 3,800 community-based organizations.

TPP organizations were reportedly expecting funding to continue until June 2020, but were given notice by the HHS that this would not be so.

In Trump’s 2018 budget proposal, the only funding included was for abstinence-only education. The spokesperson said, “The president’s fiscal year 2018 budget eliminated funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, so our grants office informed the grantees of their June 30, 2018, end date, to give them an opportunity to adjust their programs and plan for an orderly closeout.”

Some of the organizations affected by the budget cut are Johns Hopkins’ program for adolescent Apaches in Arizona, the University of Texas’ guidance for youth in foster care, and the Chicago Department of Public Health’s counseling and testing for sexually transmitted infections.

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