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A federal agency has taken controversial new steps to marginalize its own ethics body, according to new information revealed by the watchdog group Public Citizen. That after the federal ethics body criticized a government study that resulted in the deaths of some premature babies.

The government-backed study in question was called “SUPPORT.” It was conducted from 2006 to 2009 on 1,316 extremely premature infants at 23 academic institutions under the National Institutes of Health, which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Controversy surfaced in March 2013 when the government’s own ethics body, the Office of Human Research Protections, dropped a bombshell.

The ethics office found the federal study’s consent forms violated government rules designed to protect human research subjects. According to OHRP, the consent forms “failed to describe the reasonably foreseeable risks of blindness, neurological damage and death” to babies in the study.

More than a year and a half later, the federal government has yet to take enforcement action or make changes to address the shortfalls. Instead, critics say it has pressured and marginalized the ethics office that made the critical findings.

Read more from this story HERE.

This past week, President Obama warned Americans that, if the sequester occurs, hundreds of thousands of children will lose access to Project Head Start. A new study, however, published by the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has found that students who participate in the $8 billion Head Start program actually fare worse, in some ways, than students who do not.

The study also found that positive effects of the program are not sustained into elementary school.

According to the study, mandated by Congress and published at the end of 2012, the Head Start program “seeks to improve the educational and developmental outcomes for children from severely economically disadvantaged families.”

However, when researchers evaluated 4,667 elementary students, they concluded that the program provided no measurable benefit for children by the time they reached the third grade compared to those children who were in a similar socio-economic group but were not in the program. Of the children who were not enrolled in Head Start, about 60 percent received another form of preschool education, the quality of which was judged to be generally inferior to that provided in Head Start.

The large-scale study found that children who participated in the Head Start program actually did worse in math and had more problems with social interaction by the third grade than children who were not in the program.

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HHS Faces Fallout From Controversial Study That Put Babies at Risk

HHS Study: Head Start Kids Have More Problems with Math, Social Interactions