OJJDP scandal: Questions surround govt funded abstinence program.

An organization that promotes sexual abstinence for teens received a federal grant of over a million dollars, twice what it had requested, despite the skepticism Department of Justice staffers had about the group and the fact that it refused to participate in a congressionally mandated study.

So why did the Best Friends Foundation receive the grant from the Justice Department's juvenile justice office even though dozens of competing organizations were rated higher by the office's own reviewers? Current and former staffers say it was because of Best Friends' powerful president and founder, Elayne Bennett.

Not only is Bennett the wife of Bill Bennett, a former Reagan and Bush administration official and conservative political commentator, but she is also personally close to the chief administrator of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP), J. Robert Flores.
More from ABC News.

From The Youth Today:

No-Bid Grants

The following organizations won National Juvenile Justice Program grants without competitive bidding:

Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Atlanta, Ga. $40 m
Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation, Baltimore, Md. $3 m
Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, Washington, D.C. $740,000
D.A.R.E. America, Inglewood, Calif. $650,000
Eisenhower Foundation, Washington, D.C. $3 m
Father Flanagan’s Boys Home, Boys Town, Neb. $1 m
FirstPic Inc., Crofton, Md. $20 m
Girl Scouts of the USA, New York, N.Y. $750,000
National Association of Police Athletic Leagues, Jupiter, Fla. $750,000
National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, Nev. $800,000
National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame, Irving, Texas $800,000
The Wireless Foundation, Washington, D.C. $250,000

Also:

In awarding competitive grants for mentoring, research and delinquency prevention last year, J. Robert Flores passed over dozens of high-scoring bids in order to fund lower-scoring proposals –even though federally appointed experts had ranked some of those proposals 37th, 49th and 84th, according to recently obtained documents.