The Trump administration is making a mockery of the very real issue of child abuse as it peddles fake stories to advance its political goals — all while undermining legitimate efforts to protect children from harm.
During the president’s videotaped Cabinet meeting Wednesday — which seemed little more than an opportunity to show officials fawning over him — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made some mind-boggling allegations about the department he now heads. Kennedy suggested that under President Joe Biden it had been a “principal vector in this country for child trafficking” and a “collaborator in child trafficking for sex and for slavery.” (The claim appears to originate from a Republican misreading, promoted by Trump, of a DHS report about children’s nonappearance at immigration court.) There is literally no truth to these QAnon-esque ramblings — and Kennedy didn’t offer any.
But his lie is all the more vexing because the Trump administration’s unilateral slashing of federally funded programs is actually undercutting advocates for children who are at risk of abuse or already suffering from it.
For example, the administration just last week issued deep cuts to a program that helps guide abused children into safe and stable environments. The program, known as Court Appointed Special Advocates Guardians Ad Litem (abbreviated as CASA/GAL or CASA), said it had been notified by the Trump administration that its congressionally authorized grants were axed because they “no longer effectuate the program goals or agency priorities.”
As writer V Spehar recently wrote, these cuts undermine efforts to combat exactly the trafficking Trump and his administration claim they want to fight:
CASA’s services vary from state to state, but they generally help any child in an abusive or neglectful place. According to CASA’s 2023 annual report, nearly 201,000 kids were helped in 2023 alone. Included in this number are victims of the opioid crisis, children with incarcerated parents, and victims of child sex trafficking. We are talking about potentially hundreds of thousands of children being helped by VOLUNTEERS.
Spehar explained the cuts leave many CASA chapters in the lurch, suspending tens of thousands of dollars — and in one case, hundreds of thousands — in funds critical to delivering on its mission to protect at-risk children.
“Not all of CASA’s local, independently run chapters rely on federal funding,” Spehar said, “but enough of them do that the cuts are an existential nightmare of sorts for children and advocates everywhere. It feels deeply hypocritical for the man who once claimed to ‘fight for the voiceless’ in the war on human trafficking to cut funding to this degree.”
Indeed, when it comes to combating child abuse, Trump and his movement seem more focused on performance and posturing than substance. And more interested in using children as pawns in political games than in truly protecting them. Because if the president, his HHS secretary or the administration more broadly were genuinely invested in fighting child abuse and child sex trafficking, it wouldn’t be slashing funds that prevent precisely this abuse.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
