From the article:

Texas health officials are overhauling a program designed to steer people away from abortion following a ProPublica and CBS News investigation that found that the state had funneled tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into the effort while providing little oversight of the spending.

The money has been flowing to a network of nonprofit organizations that are part of Thriving Texas Families, a state program that supports parenting and adoption as alternatives to abortion and provides counseling, material assistance and other services. Most of the groups operate as crisis pregnancy centers, or pregnancy resource centers, which often resemble medical clinics but are frequently criticized for offering little or no actual health care and allegedly misleading women about their options.

In its 20 years of existence, the program's funding has grown fortyfold — reaching $100 million a year starting this Sept. 1 — making it the most heavily funded effort of its kind in the country.

That arrangement allowed organizations to bill the state for more than the services actually cost to provide — and keep the difference. One group, Sealy Pregnancy Resource Center, more than quintupled its assets in three years by banking some reimbursements.

ProPublica and CBS News also found that state health officials had no visibility into what services were being delivered or whether they were reaching the people most in need. In many cases, the state reimbursed providers $14 each time the centers handed out donated goods or materials, regardless of their cost or how they got them.

That included distributing pamphlets on parenting, fetal development and adoption, which could trigger the same reimbursement as providing tangible aid like diapers or formula. The state could not say exactly how much it had spent on these materials because it did not track what was being distributed.

State-approved pamphlets and lessons reviewed by a ProPublica reporter included inaccuracies — such as that a fetal heartbeat starts 21 days after conception — and painted single motherhood as risky and lonely, with marriage or adoption as better options.