HHS abruptly cancelled $68 million in grants for dozens of sex education initiatives, forcing Children’s Aid to lay off staff and cancel programming.

Ridwaane Tchakala was in ninth grade when his school counselor shared an unusual job opportunity: He could get paid to help educate people his own age about sex, relationships, reproductive health, and health privacy rights. 

Tchakala, a Bronx native, attended an event put on by the Children’s Aid Society, a New York City nonprofit, and in the spring of 2023, decided to apply for a role in the Just Ask Me (JAM) Peers program. 

Now 18 years old and in his first semester at Boston University, Tchakala said he thought it would be helpful to have a job where he’d be “able to relay that message to my siblings or people that are not really knowledgeable in that area.”

“I never experienced a sex ed workshops or had any knowledge of sex ed,” he said of his experience before training with the program.

The Children’s Aid program through which Tchakala was hired and trained provided evidence-based sex education to an estimated 1,200 students each year. But in June 2026, the Trump administration abruptly cancelled the grant that funded it, along with more than 50 others. In total, about $68 million that had been awarded for evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention programming was cut off two years before the grants were set to expire. 

Now, experts and advocates warn that the future of the initiative that hired and trained Tchakala to talk about privacy rights, consent, and sex with fellow teens—and dozens of others like it—is in limbo.

Children’s Aid found out its five-year grant was cancelled on June 26, 2026, through a letter posted to the portal used to communicate with the Department of Health and Human Services, Pascale Saintonge Austin, the director of family planning and pregnancy prevention programs........

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