[A] Vermont-based organization is losing more than $2 million in funding as a result of a Trump administration decision to abruptly discontinue dozens of teen pregnancy prevention grants.
Early this month, the nonprofit Youth Catalytics was to begin the second year of a five-year federal grant that paid for work to disseminate research and training concerning teen pregnancy prevention across the country.
The cut was part of a move by the Trump administration to end funding for 81 teen pregnancy prevention programs across the country, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Most of the programs received notice that their funding would not continue beyond June 30, 2018. However, Youth Catalytics was one of five grant recipients whose funding was cut effective this month. Together, the five were budgeted to receive a total of $2.9 million in this fiscal year.
According to Meagan Downey, director of special projects for Youth Catalytics, the organization was slated to receive about $564,000 annually under the five-year grant it won in June 2016. That money represented about half of the group’s budget for this fiscal year, she said.
The three-decade-old nonprofit works with communities, schools and other agencies across the country to provide training and research on serving youth on a range of issues.
In the first year of the grant, the organization trained more than 200 professionals across the country, according to Downey. The grant was to help agencies that work on youth pregnancy prevention improve communication with parents, foster care providers, teens and others.
“It was a wonderful year,” she said.
More training sessions, meetings and other events were on the horizon, she said. The abrupt severing of the funding left the staff “reeling” and trying to figure out the next steps, Downey said.
“It’s sort of like building a skyscraper and being halfway through and abandoning the project,” she said.
Downey said the letter from federal authorities did not give a reason for why the grant was discontinued. She does not know why Youth Catalytics and four other organizations with related grants were cut off immediately, while others will not be cut off until next year.
“We do not know why we were treated differently from the other grantees,” she said.
Downey said Youth Catalytics is not certain that the department had authority to make the cut outside of the legislative appropriations process. She was not aware of any precedent for grants to be cut off this way.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told VTDigger that a policy statement allows an agency to discontinue a grant “because continued funding would not be in the best interests of the federal government.”
The contact said President Donald Trump’s budget proposal for the next fiscal year does not request funding for the federal teen pregnancy program grants.
The funding cutoff provoked concern from many in Congress.
Both of Vermont’s senators signed a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price last week, along with 35 other senators.
Discontinuing the grants is “short-sighted and puts at risk the health and well-being of women and our most vulnerable youth,” the senators wrote.
The letter asks who decided to end the grants early, why they were cut before Congress completed the appropriations process for the next fiscal year, and other questions.
An aide for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, said the senator is “troubled by” the decision to cease funding for the grants.
Leahy is seeking to keep the funding for the programs in place this year and prevent similar department-level decisions in the future, according to spokesperson David Carle.
A spokesperson for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., did not return requests for comment about the cuts.
Meanwhile, the staff at Youth Catalytics is still reacting to the news, according to Downey. The organization sent a letter late last week to the federal department in an attempt to get funding restored, she said.
“We’d really just like to get back to work, work that we were in the middle of,” she said.