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Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) and Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP). TPP is operated by the Office of Population Affairs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health; PREP is operated by the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. Both programs should ensure that there is better reporting of subgrantees and referral lists so that they do not promote abortion or high-risk sexual behavior among adolescents. CMS should ensure that Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) proponents receive these grants and are given every opportunity to prove their effectiveness. SRA programs, both at ACF and at OASH and both discretionary and mandatory, should be equal in funding and emphasis. Qualitative research should be conducted on both types of programs to ensure continuous improvement.

In addition, certain provisions should be employed so that these programs do not serve as advocacy tools to promote sex, promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics, or for similar purposes. Parent involvement and parent-child communication should be encouraged and bea part of any funded project. Risk avoidance should be prioritized, and any program that submits a proposal that promotes risk rather than health should not be eligible for funding.

Site visits should be revamped to ensure adherence to these optimal health metrics, and a cost analysis of programming as compared to students served should be a metric in funding (taking into account that in certain cases, intensive programs will serve fewer students and can have more positive results). These same parameters should apply to sex education programs at ACF. Any lists with “approved curriculum” or so-called evidence-based lists should be abolished; HHS should not create a monopoly of curriculum, adding to the profit of certain publishers. Furthermore, lists created in the past have given priority to sex-promotion textbooks. HHS should create a list of criteria for evaluating the sort of curriculum that should be selected for any sex education grant programs, both at OASH and at ACF, with the aim of promoting optimal health and adhering to the legislative language of each program.

Adoption Reform. There are roughly 400,000 children across the nation on the waiting list for foster care and 100,000 awaiting adoptive families, and the opioid/ fentanyl crisis is putting more at risk every day. Unfortunately, many of the faithbased adoption agencies that serve these children are under threat from lawsuits, or else their licenses and contracts have been halted because they cannot in good conscience place children in every household due to their religious belief that a child should have a married mother and father.

HHS, through ACF and the Assistant Secretary for Financial Resources (ASFR), should repeal the unnecessary 2016 regulation® that imposes nonstatutory sexual orientation and gender identity nondiscrimination conditions on agency grants and return to the policy of maximizing the options for placing vulnerable children

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in their forever homes. ACF and OCR should also survey their programs to consider whether additional waivers of HHS grant conditions—waivers the Biden Administration revoked in 2021—are needed for faith-based agencies.

Additionally, Congress should pass the Child Welfare Provider Inclusion Act® to ensure that providers and organizations cannot be subjected to discrimination for providing adoption and foster care services based on their beliefs about marriage.

Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). The Office of Refugee Resettlement should be moved to the Department of Homeland Security. Having health and welfare functions managed by HHS and border security functions managed by DHS has created intolerable failures in both. HHS and ORR have forgotten their original refugee-resettlement mission and instead have provided a panoply of free programs that incentivize people to come to the U.S. illegally. Even more troubling, ORR has too often placed children into dangerous situations when releasing them into the country.

Nearly all of HHS’s care, custody, and placement of children is done through cooperative agreements with private agencies, many of which may have broken federal law by inducing or being accomplices in illegal immigration. Those arrangements could be handled far more effectively by DHS. Congress should reform the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act® to transfer all ORR duties for unaccompanied alien children to DHS and eliminate the Flores settlement agreement.”

Regardless of where ORR’s functions reside, ORR staff and care providers should never be allowed to facilitate abortions for unaccompanied children in its custody, including by transporting minors across state lines from pro-life states to abortion-friendly states. Pregnant, unaccompanied girls in ORR custody should be treated with dignity, not trafficked across state lines to be victimized by the abortion industry. ORR should withdraw its policy of allowing elective abortions for children in ORR care and issue a new policy of instructing care providers not to allow girls to be transported for elective abortions. HHS OGC and the White House should insist that DOJ fight to defend that policy up to the U.S. Supreme Court in light of Dobbs.

Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) Congress established Aid to Families with Dependent Children in 1935 to assist single-parent families who were suffering financially from the loss of a bread-winning husband and father. Within two decades, however, the majority of families receiving aid were dependent because of paternal abandonment rather than death. Today, nearly a third of America’s children live without a father present in the home, and a fourth of them are enrolled to receive child support.

The glaring issue in child support enforcement today is a non-resident father’s ability to provide full or consistent child support payments. The literature reflects this divide as fathers have been categorized as “deadbeat” dads, then as “deadbroke”