We've posted in the past about WSU's National Child Protection Training Center, which teaches law enforcement, teachers, social workers, prosecutors and others the best techniques for recognizing, reducing and preventing child sexual abuse. The center has received funding through earmarks requested by Senators Coleman and Klobuchar, as well as by Congressman Walz.
Members of Minnesota's congressional delegation sought money for the center after the Department of Justice turned it down for federal grant funding, despite its application's high scoring by reviewers.
So which grants did the administrator at the DOJ's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention pick to fund in its stead? Juvienation, Mark Sorkin's blog that covers juvenile justice issues, tells a story of Cronyism at the OJJDP:
Youth Today editor Patrick Boyle, who broke the story, has done something only top-notch investigative reporters do: earn the attention of government watchdog Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In the January issue of Youth Today, Boyle ran a long story with the headline “For Juvenile Justice, a Panel of One” . . .[subscription only]
. . .The story exposed rampant cronyism on the part of J. Robert Flores, a Bush appointee who has headed the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, a Justice Department agency, since 2002. Last spring, Boyle reported, the OJJDP posted a request for proposals that was surprisingly broad and that made a generous amount of money available to prospective grantees. “After years of seeing almost all of its discretionary funds eaten up by congressional earmarks, the agency now had millions of dollars to award through competitive bidding, thanks to the slashing of nearly all earmarks in fiscal 2007,” Boyle wrote.Juvenile justice organizations flocked, but their enthusiasm was misplaced. “A dozen organizations won grants without competitive bidding,” Boyle noted. The scoring system to assess bids for competitive grants was problematic (managed by agency staff, lacking in peer review, rushed), and anyway, it was disregarded. None of the six top-scoring organizations were awarded grants; twenty-one bids that scored 90 or higher (out of 100) were similarly denied. . . .
. . .Flores, Boyle wrote, “has repeatedly pushed to get agency money to organizations that fit his priorities, which include faith-based programs and those that combat child sexual victimization.” Thus the low-scoring Best Friends Foundation (79.5), headed by the wife of right-wing moral crusader (and gambling addict!) Bill Bennett, won more than $1 million for its abstinence-only/anti-drug curriculum. Enough Is Enough, which combats sexual predation online–admittedly a worthy cause, but not quite in line with the historical mission of the OJJDP–took $750,000. The faith-based Victory Outreach Special Services got a windfall of $1.2 million but had to turn down the grant because, Boyle noted, “it doesn’t have the organizational capacity to carry it out.” Meanwhile, well-known, well-reputed, high-scoring organizations that do have the capacity to serve honest-to-goodness juvenile justice needs–like Dunlap’s National Partnership for Juvenile Services and Barry Krisberg’s National Council on Crime and Delinquency, among many others–got a big bag of bubkes.
When Minnesota Democratic Representative Tim Walz got word of this scandal, he requested an investigation into possible violation of the OJJDP bidding process. (Winona State University, whose National Child Protection Training Center ranked fourth but received no grant money, is in his district.) As Boyle reported in a follow-up article, Waxman’s House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform ably stepped in on March 13 . . .
We're still trying to figure out what the specific problem with Congressman Walz's earmarks is, being that they support child protection, roads to somewhere, renewable energy research, veterans reintegration, the Lewis & Clark Water Rural Water Project and other worthy projects. And Congressman Walz is quite open with his list of requests.
Perhaps the endorsed "family values" candidate or party rebel Dick Day, his GOP primary challenger, can explain to voters why Congressman Walz, Senator Klobuchar, and their own Senator Coleman, shouldn't have gone to bat for the National Child Protection Training Center. We'd like to hear it specifically discussed, rather than an abstract ideological litany about the funding process.
We note, too, that for Walz, securing funding for the Center wasn't enough. Upon learning of the OJJDP bidding process scandal, he requested an investigation of the process to help ensure that tax dollars go to grant proposals that have merit, rather than just friends in high places.
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