Charities Should Disagree With Government

I should have known my organization was in trouble in the summer of 2003 when the call came from our program officer at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, informing us that we would be subjected to our third government audit in eight months. The organization I serve, Advocates for Youth, has been a government grantee for more than 20 years, through Republican and Democratic administrations, and never once had it been subjected to an audit.

But that had changed, and as one government employee told us, we had a “bull’s-eye on our back.”

What had we done wrong? Had we embezzled government funds, paid for an all-inclusive vacation in Cancun with federal dollars, pulled an “Enron” with our books?

No. In fact, we passed each audit with flying colors. The independent auditor who conducted the most recent review stated that “overall financial systems and organization at Advocates for Youth are strong and well managed.”

Our offense, it seemed, was that we had questioned the Bush administration’s “abstinence only until marriage” policy on sex education one too many times.

Regardless of which political party is in the White House, the potential for abuse in the relationship between government and nonprofit groups will always exist. Since one of the most important functions of the nonprofit world is to “speak truth to power,” it is important that all nonprofit organizations stand together when the ability of any one of us to speak out is threatened by government officials. The experience of Advocates for Youth offers a cautionary tale about what can happen to a nonprofit group’s ability to carry out its mission when government agencies become overly politicized and nothing is done to stop it.

In my case, I should have seen the proverbial handwriting on the wall in 2001 when an internal Department of Health and Human Services e-mail message found its way into The Washington Post.

The memo attacked Advocates for Youth as an “ardent opponent of the Bush administration” and criticized a project supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help parents effectively communicate with their children about sex because the effort failed to comport with the “Catholic beliefs” of Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson. The secretary’s office, clearly embarrassed by the e-mail message’s suggestion that public health projects were being reviewed based on religious criteria, declared that the memo had been “withdrawn,” whatever that meant.

However, the message had been delivered loud and clear: If you receive government money, you had better not dispute government policy, or you’ll end up on an “enemies list.”

How did we end up in this situation? Did we go looking for a political fight? Hardly.

Our job at Advocates for Youth is to develop programs and promote policies that protect young people from pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, and HIV. In 2000, the Institute of Medicine, the nation’s leading authority on science, published a major report on youth and HIV that was highly critical of abstinence-only programs and called them “poor fiscal and public-health policy.”

The Institute of Medicine called for an end to those programs because they lack credible evidence of their effectiveness. In addition, numerous mainstream health organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, have gone on record in support of a comprehensive approach to sex education, one that includes messages about both abstinence and contraception — the very approach that Advocates for Youth promotes.

My colleagues and I work with young people every day, and we knew at the time from the research and our own experience that a one-size-fits-all solution to the complex issues young people face simply wasn’t going to be effective and was a waste of government dollars. So, we felt obliged to speak out publicly. Our organizational integrity and, more important, the health of the young people with whom we work were on the line.

The result was a series of audits of our organization, demanded by conservative members of Congress, who were adamant in their support for the president’s abstinence-only approach. In September 2002, 24 members of Congress sent a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services, asking it to “investigate” Advocates for Youth and “take into consideration” Advocates for Youth’s actions when “examining funding and grant proposals.”

I understand and respect the need for government audits of nonprofit groups that receive federal dollars. Our books should be open, and Advocates for Youth welcomed the auditors with open arms and coffee and doughnuts on the table. But three audits in less than a year suggests that politics — not good government — is at play. When Rep. Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, questioned Secretary Thompson about whether his department was also auditing abstinence-only groups, Mr. Thompson responded in a letter saying that his agency was not, and had no plans to do so. That, despite the fact that Congress has approved nearly $1-billion for abstinence-only programs since 1996, with the largest increases occurring since President Bush took office.

Advocates for Youth is hardly the only organization that has faced punitive action for having the temerity to raise public-policy issues that did not accord with “official ideology.”

The Global Health Council, one of the most well-respected nonprofit groups that specializes in international health issues, had $365,000 in federal aid pulled from its national conference in June because the list of speakers included critics of some administration policies. (The organization has received federal money for its conferences for the past 30 years.)

Stop AIDS, a San Francisco nonprofit group devoted to HIV prevention among sexually active gay men, was subjected to three government audits in 18 months because the Department of Health and Human Services found its materials too explicit, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Each audit found that the organization had fully complied with federal laws.

For decades, the partnership between the federal government and the nonprofit world has been a fruitful one. Nonprofit groups provide a tremendous range of expertise and services in the areas of education, health, the environment, social welfare, and many other social concerns.

Nonprofit groups provide not only valuable programs but also substantive and timely policy analysis that can inform the public debate and influence public policy.

It is perfectly appropriate for new political administrations to come in and put their stamp on public policy. That is part of the political process. But it is also perfectly appropriate for nonprofit groups to speak up, particularly when those policies fail to meet basic public-health standards or run contrary to scientific or research findings.

It is also perfectly appropriate for nonprofit groups to lobby Congress on policy issues, so long as they abide by Internal Revenue Service regulations and do not use federal grant dollars. Our democratic system not only tolerates such tensions between government and nonprofit groups, but it also encourages them by preserving, in law, nonprofit groups’ right to pursue advocacy.

Using the government audit process to intimidate nonprofit organizations that raise concerns about policy threatens the foundation of the government-nonprofit relationship that has endured for the last 30 years.

Government functions best when it functions openly, and nonprofit groups play a critical role as “canaries in the coal mine,” providing an early warning when government policies are getting out of line with longstanding principles and with what are considered to be the best practices in a particular field. This watchdog role may create conflicts, but those conflicts are generally healthy ones that encourage the public debates that are central to the mission of democracy.

The apparatus of government should never be used to censor or put pressure on organizations that raise policy concerns. A nonprofit group’s ability to attract government funds should not be tied to its willingness to remain silent on major policy issues of the day. People who work at nonprofit groups do not leave their civil liberties at the door.

Major public-policy issues are now at stake. My organization believes that decades of public-health science are being undermined by current practice. Fact sheets on condom use have been censored, scientific research findings have been removed from government Web sites, and ideological firebrands with little or no public-health background have been appointed to government review panels.

And the current controversy goes well beyond the field of public health or the stem-cell research issue that has received so much public attention. More than 5,000 scientists — including 48 Nobel Prize winners — have signed a letter decrying the manipulation of science in numerous public-policy fields, from the environment to the staffing of government advisory committees.

The last thing the nonprofit world should tolerate is those in power making an example of organizations that raise important issues in the public debate. If they do, nonprofit groups will internalize the message that government ideologues want to send: “Remain silent or lose your government grant.”

Silencing our voices won’t make the problems go away. Nonprofit officials have a right, indeed an obligation, to make our views known, for it is in the public discourse that democracy flourishes.

James Wagoner is president of Advocates for Youth, in Washington.