For Valerie Cumming, sex education has become not just about giving students information but helping them process the “info dump” of misleading, bizarre, or outright dangerous material they’re encountering online and through social media.
“They’re not hearing about sex from friends whispering at sleepovers, like it used to be pre-internet,” said Cumming, a sex educator and teacher coach at the statewide adolescent-health nonprofit Eyes Open Iowa.
Now, she said, there’s TikTok, forums like Reddit and Discord, and other sources that tend to lack nuance, accuracy, and often aren’t inclusive of LGBTQ+ issues.
There could soon be fewer official avenues to push back on misinformation, thanks to proposals to change the federal government’s role in sex ed.
The Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget proposal would consolidate major federal grants for sex education as part of a program of cuts in behavioral health programs.
The consolidated programs would include the $34.5 million Sexual Risk Avoidance Program, which provides grants to states to promote education on delaying sex and avoiding relationship violence, and the $349 million Teenage Pregnancy Prevention Program, which provides state and communities with money for comprehensive sex education.
The proposal would also eliminate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Adolescent and School Health, which collects data on adolescent mental health and risky behaviors such as sex and drug use and promotes evidence-based sexual and adolescent education and health services in schools, including for LGBTQ+ students.
The administration also tried to cut funding for sex education in fiscal 2026, and in August 2025 told states they must remove all references to gender identity in sex ed. materials or lose federal funding for two other funding opportunities, the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) and Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE). A federal judge later blocked the cuts after a lawsuit by 16 states and the District of Columbia.
Sex ed. has long been a political football
Sex education has long been a political punching bag. Shifts toward abstinence-only education gained traction in the late 1990s and accelerated during President George H.W. Bush’s term in office; those changes were rolled back somewhat in the mid-2010s. The latest suite of proposed changes worries some who work in the field, especially as questions about how to educate students about the delicate topic becomes more complicated in an AI-saturated world.
“Even in states where there’s a sex education law on the books, the approach will erode what is good sex education and ... create a chilling effect for teachers” by changing the focus of the classes, said Alison Macklin, a spokesman for SEICUS: Sex Ed. for Social Change, a nonprofit advocacy organization.
Research meta-analyses, including by the World Health Organization, have found comprehensive sex education is associated with students delaying when they first have sex and having fewer partners.
“A lot of folks might have the idea that if we teach sex ed., we’re putting the ideas in these kids’ heads and they’re thinking, ‘Ooh, this sounds really sexy, this sounds really enticing, I’m going to go out and do that,’” said Cumming, the Iowa sex educator, “and the data actually show the opposite.”
The proposals follow another Heritage Foundation playbook
The proposed changes generally align with the focus of a new policy report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank whose 900-page Project 2025 policy agenda has underpinned President Trump’s second administration.
In a January 2026 report, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” Heritage urged states to teach students to avoid premarital sex and parenting as part of a success sequence to avoid poverty.
“It is simple enough,” the report says. “Teach young people that graduating from high school, getting married, and having children—in that order—is a near-guarantee of life success.”
Though Heritage does not specifically advocate teaching the success sequence in sex education curricula, it recommended that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services “direct funding toward pro-marriage public awareness campaigns with simple messages, such as ‘Give her a ring before she gives you a baby.’”
Conservative lawmakers in Iowa and at least seven other states want schools to teach students the success sequence, Education Week reported recently, often as part of health education. The bills install abstinence-aligned messaging about childbearing into curricula in states that in many cases already constrain sex education.
A little over half of states require sex education, with most still focused on “abstinence-only” rather than a comprehensive frameworks that typically include prevention and protection, as well as broader themes of consent, healthy relationships, and often gender identity and sexual orientation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures and SEICUS. Research has generally found abstinence-only programs to be ineffective at reducing pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.
For practitioners like Cumming, a narrower focus on what sex education should cover could limit educators’ ability to correct unhealthy or even dangerous myths and misconceptions around adolescent development, sex, and relationships.
Cumming has been working with students and coaching teachers on sex education for seven years.
Her worry: sex-related information is so widely accessible to young people that they’re often “info-dumped” with material that’s not age-appropriate, accurate, or helpful.
For example, Cumming said, about five years ago, an urban legend spread on TikTok suggesting that at-home pregnancy tests secretly contained “Plan B"—an emergency-contraceptive pill. In videos, teenagers would crack open the tests to show a small tablet that looked like a pill—but was actually a desiccant used to absorb moisture and prevent mold or spoilage.
“I know of at least one student who believed that [it was a contraceptive] and took that tablet,” Cumming recalled. “Now, they lived to tell the tale—but we know that that’s not healthy.”
Early exposure to pornography raises student questions, misconceptions
Earlier pornography exposure online have driven similarly dangerous misconceptions for students, and concerns for educators and legislators alike. A majority of children have seen pornography online by age 13—often by pop-up advertisements—and the age of first exposure is dropping, even to children as young as 8, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Early exposure has increased the number of students Cumming sees copying risky behavior they see, such as having unprotected oral sex commonly depicted in online pornography.
“It varies kid to kid, what they’re seeing and how much they realize it’s real versus buying into that fantasy,” she said.
A complication of the Trump administration’s plan is that sex education is among the most local of all curriculum mandates, shaped mainly by state and even district requirements. It’s unclear how much impact the administration’s new vision could have.
Cumming’s state of Iowa currently requires age-appropriate and research-based sex education be taught in public schools. But that could change.
One proposed bill in the state would require the success sequence be taught in grades 7-12, including in the same health course in which the human development content is taught. If the new bill narrowed sex education to focus only on avoiding sex before marriage, it would hurt students’ long-term life skills, she said.
“The information young people are learning during sex ed. in 4th and 5th grade, and then especially in middle and high school, these are things about consent and bodily autonomy and healthy relationships, creating their own boundaries and respecting the boundaries of others,” she said. “These are skills that adults are still using that they learned as young people during sex ed.”
Cumming said middle schoolers tend to have much deeper understanding of relationships and consent than they did a decade ago.
“The average 7th grader now ... will compare [consent] to a permission slip for a field trip or something like that,” she said. “We can use the analogies they already know, and then build off of it ... to get really more in depth and think more critically about what consent really means.”
