Faith-based initiatives office defends its efforts

With a new leader and a revived mission, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives hopes to move past the controversies that dogged the organization in its first year. But some scholars still doubt the program's usefulness. Speaking Wednesday at a panel discussion hosted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Jim Towey, who took over as director of the faith-based office last month, dismissed the notion that the office's first year was a failure. Instead he focused on the challenges ahead. "Our office is not big, it does not have a lot of staff, it does not have a large budget, but what it does have is an important job to reach out and help those who are hurting in our society," Towey said. President Bush created the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives just days after entering office to give religious groups greater access to government grants and other funds. But critics attacked the initiative on several fronts, raising questions about issues of separation of church and state. The office also had to grapple with how to stop providers of religious services from discriminating against recipients with different religious beliefs; how to allow recipients to opt out of religious portions of programs; and how to avoid applying religious beliefs when making hiring decisions. Beyond these issues, the faith-based initiative faced many other challenges in its first year, including shifting priorities, former Director John DiIulio Jr.'s lack of autonomy, minimal coordination with the White House and the administration's inflated expectations, according to panelist Kathryn Dunn Tempas, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and director of the University of Pennsylvania's Washington Semester Program. Tempas critiqued the faith-based initiative's first year in her recent report, "Can an Office Change a Country? A Report on the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives." "The president and his staff would be wise to heed the lessons of the first year…as they carve out a new role in its second year of life," Tempas said. According to Tempas, the faith-based initiative's biggest success in 2001 was establishing offices at five major federal agencies. The offices, created at the Education, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Labor departments, were asked to identify the barriers that prevent faith-based and community groups from winning government contracts from their agencies. An August report compiled by the five offices found that agencies often exclude faith-based and community organizations from social service programs. Still, panelists questioned the need for the faith-based initiative, arguing that it is duplicative. Panelists cited the Salvation Army and Catholic charities as examples of faith-based organizations that already get federal funds. "If you can do it now, why aren't faith-based organizations filing for [nonprofit] status?," asked Paul Light, vice president and director of governmental studies at the Brookings Institution. But Towey was resolute. "This is about providing equal treatment, a level playing field and removing real world barriers to the fair participation of faith-based organizations in some of the programs that the government runs," he said.