Though Donald Trump may have plenty on his plate this week—hello, James Comey's forthcoming Senate hearing—the president did manage to find the time to appoint Valerie Huber as the chief of staff to the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a staff email obtained by The Hill. What makes this appointment particularly noteworthy: Huber has been a long-standing abstinence-only education advocate, led Ohio's abstinence and education program from 2004 to 2007, and previously served as the president of Ascend, a group formerly known as the National Abstinence Education Association that is dedicated to promoting a "no sex until marriage" approach to sex ed.

As explained on the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH) website, the goal of this branch within HHS is "to optimize the nation's investment in health and science to advance health equity and improve the health of all people." With the addition of Huber to the department, this means that there is now a person in a critical role who will vouch for an ineffective approach to sexual education.

In a 2016 interview with PBS, Huber, who prefers the term "sexual risk avoidance" to "abstinence education," was resistant to evidence that contraception helps reduce unwanted teen pregnancies. She said, "As public health experts and policymakers, we must normalize sexual delay more than we normalize teen sex, even with contraception.”

But as one study conducted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) revealed, "abstinence education in the U.S. does not cause abstinence behavior. To the contrary, teens in states that prescribe more abstinence education are actually more likely to become pregnant." Beyond pregnancy, as the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States has noted, the abstinence-only approach does little to effectively prevent the spread of HIV or other sexually transmitted infections.

When states have comprehensive sex ed that includes information about HIV/STI prevention, condom use, and contraception, however, teen pregnancy rates drop. And as the NIH further explained, "Abstinence-only programs tend to promote abstinence behavior through emotion, such as romantic notions of marriage, moralizing, fear of STDs, and by spreading scientifically incorrect information.... As a result, these programs may actually be promoting irresponsible, high-risk teenage behavior by keeping teens uneducated with regard to reproductive knowledge and sound decision-making instead of giving them the tools to make educated decisions regarding their reproductive health."

According to the Guttmacher Institute, just 24 states and the District of Columbia mandate sex ed, and only 22 incorporate HIV education as well. Even worse, only 13 states require that sex ed provide medically accurate information. With Huber now in this major OASH role, it's unlikely that any of those stats will increase, let alone that they'll apply to all 50 states.

Though Huber's appointment has sparked plenty of criticism, it's certainly not surprising. Trump's proposed 2018 budget would allocate nearly $300 million dollars for abstinence education over a decade-long period and completely eliminate the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program within the Office of Adolescent Health.