WASHINGTON (ABP) — In response to growing criticism of his “faith-based initiative,” President Bush touted White House figures March 9 showing growth in federal funding of religious charities last year.
The figures give a different picture than a recent study by a non-partisan group that monitors Bush's initiative. And the discrepancy between the two sets of statistics underscores the difficulty in measuring the effects of the policy precisely.
Bush, speaking to a White House-sponsored conference for leaders of religious and community charitable groups, said the federal government had given nearly $2.1 billion in grants to religious charities in fiscal 2005. That amount reflected an increase of 7 percent over last year's figure.
“We're making progress about creating a level playing field for people to be comfortable in, one, applying for grants, and two, when receiving a grant — and then actually getting the money out the door to social service organizations,” Bush said.
Shortly after he took office in 2001, Bush presented the plan — to increase the government's ability to fund social services through churches and other deeply religious groups — as the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. While concerns about the separation of church and state and other aspects of the program mostly stymied it in Congress, Bush managed to implement much of its provisions through executive order.
Prior to the changes, most federal programs did not provide grants directly to churches or other deeply religious groups. Instead, religious groups would often set up separate but affiliated charities that provided essentially secular social services, which were eligible for federal funding.
Bush and his supporters argued that such separation discriminated against smaller churches or charities that were doing effective work, but did not have such clear separation between their explicitly religious and secular functions.
“Now, when the government is making social service grants, money is rewarded to groups…that get the best results, regardless of whether they're a faith-based program or not,” he said March 9.”That's all people want. They want access to grant money on an equal basis, on a competitive basis, so there's no discrimination one way or the other.”
However, in recent months, several religious leaders Bush initially recruited to push the plan have turned on it. They have criticized the president for talking about funding social services through religious groups publicly, but reducing the overall pool of funds available to charitable groups by cutting discretionary spending on social services.
A study, released in Feburary by the Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, seemed to confirm that view. It tracked 99 federal grant-making programs between 2002 and 2004 to gauge how much they gave to groups the study considered religiously affiliated. It found that, while the share of the funds given to faith-based providers versus secular providers remained steady, the total amount of funding had decreased over the period, from $670 million in fiscal 2002 to $626 million in fiscal 2004.
The White House immediately attacked that study. Jim Towey, head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, accused its authors of “cherry-picking” because they did not take into account new federal programs that had appeared during the period covered — nor did it include grantees the White House considers “faith-based,” but that were simply renewing government grants they had received since before the faith-based initiative even existed.
Lisa Montiel, the Roundtable's research scientist and a professor at the affiliated Rockefeller Institute of the State University of New York at Albany, said that, while her study was interested in tracking growth of new funding for faith-based groups, the new White House figures seemed the result of an attempt to gauge any federal spending on groups that might be considered “faith-based.”
“Just from looking at the quantity of the awards and the dollar amount they looked at this year and in previous years, they looked at continuation of funding,” she said, in a March 10 telephone interview. “Ours only includes any new, competitive [federal grant-making] opportunities that come out each year.”
The Roundtable study also showed that only a small percentage of the federal grant money it studied went to congregations or other small local organizations — the very types of groups Bush has said the faith-based push was designed to help. According to that study, congregation-based groups got less than 10 percent of the federal funding over the three years studied, their share decreasing every year.
Meanwhile, large regional, national or international faith-based groups got the lion's share of the funding — with nearly 54 percent going to such groups in fiscal 2004. Many of those are groups, like Catholic Charities or Lutheran Social Services, that provide services essentially secular in content and that would have been eligible for federal funds before Bush's initiative.
Towey, in a March 9 conference call with reporters, said the White House hasn't had the time or resources to provide a breakdown of the 2005 funding figures by organization size. “We don't go into the size of the organizations that it's meant to help,” Towey said. “It's very hard to know that.”
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a consistent critic of Bush's faith-based push, said March 10 the White House figures were an act of legerdemain, meant to distract from the reality that there is less federal funding for social-service organizations of any kind.
“Certainly, clearly the vast majority of these grantees would have been eligible and would have played by the rules of no [religion-based employment] discrimination and no evangelization 10 years ago, before there was a faith-based initiative,” he said. “A relatively small percentage of these grants are to new groups.”
Towey admitted that the government has tightened its belt on some social programs, which he attributed to increases in spending on national security since 9/11 and disaster recovery since the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005. “I do think it's true that the discretionary dollar has been squeezed,” he said, in response to a reporter's question.
But, Towey said, directing more money to faith-based groups could increase the overall effectiveness of federal spending on social services. “We're trying to change the culture within the federal government, which doesn't measure the outcomes,” he said.
Towey said the administration is currently studying the effectiveness of such grants, to compare them to the outcomes from more traditional spending on social services. “That's a work in progress. But the White House expects to issue a report on results later this year,” he told reporters.
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