By Alex Wayne, CQ Staff

When he became president, George W. Bush was a vocal proponent of adolescent chastity and started trying to increase government spending on abstinence-only education in schools, with the hope that it would reach $320 million a year. It peaked at about $170 million in fiscal 2005.

Once Democrats gained control of Congress in 2007, though, they gradually started shrinking the program’s funding, pointing out that most research has shown that sex education focused exclusively on abstinence doesn’t keep teens from having sex, and that health care professionals generally disagree with the program on the grounds that it doesn’t teach teens about other forms of birth control or about safe sexual practices. Now, with Barack Obama in the White House, it’s the beginning of the end for abstinence-only education.

Last week, Democrats moved to cut the program another $14 million, reducing it to a $95 million annual amount for the final months of fiscal 2009. And with Obama and his party pledging to start tackling record budget deficits, abstinence programs will probably make for easy targets in the fiscal 2010 budget debate now getting started.

“I’d say the prospects don’t look good,” says Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, the culturally conservative senior Republican on the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls most of the funding for the program.

Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Association, which was formed two years ago to lobby for the program, says the budget is a setback, but perhaps not a defeat. “We really hope that this is more of an indication of a fiscal haircut due to economic times rather than an ideological move, but I guess time will tell,” she says. “I think it’s premature to draw any sweeping policy predictions based on that.”

Talk of abstinence, though, is unpopular on Capitol Hill these days — because of doubts that it works and because it’s a favorite of religious conservatives loyal to the GOP. Senate appropriators last summer voted to cut 25 percent of the program’s budget, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California wants to eliminate funding for the program entirely, telling a gathering of liberal bloggers last summer, according to The New York Times, “Abstinence-only programs are bad policy and dangerous to the health of young women.”

It’s one of the few Health and Human Services Department programs that would be cut under the spending plan that passed the House last week and goes before the Senate this week; the department itself would get a 4 percent increase. The cut probably would have been deeper but for Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey , who has given lukewarm support to the program. During debate on funding for abstinence-only education two years ago, the Wisconsin Democrat urged “a cease-fire on the theological debates that politicians have on this issue.”

“Mr. Obey,” says Huber, “has been very fair in the past regarding this.”

James Wagoner, president of Advocacy for Youth, a group that presses for funding for comprehensive sex education for teens and opposes abstinence-only education, criticizes Obey for not cutting deeper. “There remains a major problem in the House, with Chairman Obey, who continues to try to fund these ‘ideological earmarks,’ despite Congress’ own evaluation, stating they had ‘no impact’ on teen behavior,” he says. Obey’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

The research on abstinence-only education is at best inconclusive. In 2007, Mathematica Policy Research delivered a report (ordered by Congress 10 years earlier) on the effectiveness of the government’s first abstinence program; it found that abstinence programs had no significant effect. After the report, many states began refusing the federal abstinence money.

Some senior Democrats are willing to fund “comprehensive” sex education, in which students are encouraged to abstain but also are taught how to protect themselves if they do become sexually active. “There’s a role for abstinence education,” says Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. “But if it’s education, one has to lay out the whole range of options. It needs to be accurate, it needs to be appropriate, and it needs to be educational.”

That, Republicans counter, sends teens a mixed message. “It’s like having a keg party at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” Tiahrt says. “It’s just encouraging bad behavior, in my opinion.”