Posted on: Saturday, March 5, 2005
Faith-based federal grants grow
By Mark Silva
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has increased federal money going to religious organizations that deliver social services for the needy, despite President Bush's failure to win congressional support for his vision of "rallying the armies of compassion."
"It is said that faith can move mountains," Bush said this week in announcing that $2 billion in federal grants had gone to "faith-based" organizations during the 2004 budget year.
"Here in Washington, D.C., those helping the poor and needy often run up against a big mountain — called bureaucracy."
The spending represents a 14 percent increase in money disbursed by five federal agencies ranging from the Departments of Education to Health and Human Services. Their grants to faith-based groups grew from $1.17 billion in 2003 to $1.334 billion in 2004.
Faith-based groups also won a growing share of a shrinking pie of federal grants that these agencies awarded to competing private charities last year — ranging from modest awards, such as $323,182 for Chicago's Night Ministry, to more substantial grants, such as $618,658 for the Family Christian Health Center of Harvey, Ill.
The Night Ministry, a non-denominational group, draws $100,000 from Health and Human Services to support a "health outreach bus" delivering healthcare and spiritual support to the streets. "Cookies, coffee and condoms ... we hand them all out," spokeswoman Kari McLean said.
Overall, the White House said, $2 billion was disbursed to faith-based social services last year, when grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development and Department of Agriculture also are taken into account. Those agencies said their faith-based grants were up from a year ago, but they did not categorize such spending in the previous year, so they could not provide comparisons.
While some critics complain that even this level of spending falls short of what Bush pledged at the start, other observers point out that presidents from Richard Nixon to Bush's own father have found less success spurring federal support for private social action.
"It always seems to be something that sounds good that you can do on the cheap and then suddenly you wake up and say, 'Hey, I'm running the United States, I'm running the world, and how much time can you give to points of light?' " said Stephen Hess, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The White House hails the increased spending as proof that religious charities can effectively compete with other not-for-profit agencies delivering social services with government aid.
"I've seen the barriers come down," said Jim Towey, a devout Catholic, registered Democrat and onetime legal counsel for Mother Teresa who serves as director of the White House's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
Critics of government aid for religious groups complain that Bush has made an end run around Congress, which has resisted his appeal for legislation for his "faith-based initiatives." Bush campaigned in 2000 with a pledge to "rally the armies of compassion" and asked Congress to not only authorize federal funding for church-based charities, but also support $8 billion in tax incentives for individuals making charitable donations to religious organizations.
The Republican-led Congress has rebuffed Bush's plans since 2001. So Bush signed an executive order in 2002 permitting faith-based organizations to compete on an equal footing with other private charities for grants distributed by several federal agencies.
"There is the whole troublesome issue of executive power in general — how much the White House acts on a number of issues without legislative authority," said Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Tanner also questioned the legal strings that federal agencies are likely to start attaching to government money allotted to faith-based charities, such as the $5 million that went to Chicago-area Catholic Charities in 2003.
"With federal money inevitably comes federal strings and federal control, and in the long term this can turn these private groups into local agents of the federal programs they were designed to replace," Tanner said. "It does worry me when you see more and more groups being brought in under this umbrella."
Bush, addressing a roundtable of groups including the YMCA, Salvation Army and Big Brothers/Big Sisters on Tuesday, called on Congress to enact legislation this year ensuring that faith-based groups collecting federal money can still hire people of their own choosing — enabling them to hire people of the same faith.
And, once again, Bush said that if Congress does not act he will consider another executive order.
