White House Details President Bush’s Social-Service Efforts

During the last eight years, President Bush has helped steered billions of public dollars to religious organizations and other charities to fight poverty and provide other services, according to a new White House report.

The report, Innovations in Compassion: A Final Report to the Armies of Compassion, outlines Mr. Bush’s controversial effort to allow more churches and other religious groups to compete for money from federal social-service programs. Civil-liberties groups have criticized the effort, saying it is tantamount to government support for religion.

The report also promotes Mr. Bush’s work to grow HIV/AIDS treatment overseas, curb malaria, and provide incentives for Americans to volunteer or donate to charity.

As part of the White House’s Faith-Based and Community Service Initiative, “federal partnerships with faith-based and other community organizations have greatly expanded,” Mr. Bush writes in the introduction to the report. “Most importantly, together we have brought life-changing aid to millions in need.”

Among Mr. Bush’s accomplishments, the report says, are providing addiction services to more than 250,000 drug addicts, offering antiretroviral treatment to 10.1 million people with HIV/AIDS in Africa and elsewhere, and helping to reduce the number of chronic homeless people by 30 percent from 2005 to 2007.

But Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a civil-liberties advocacy group in Washington, says the report “seeks to mask the shortcomings of a badly failed policy.”

“President Bush should have gotten the Golden Globe for playing a ‘compassionate conservative’ while doing precious little to actually help disadvantaged Americans,” says the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the group’s executive director, in a statement.

With President-elect Obama taking office next week, the report offers several suggestions for how the next administration should continue efforts to aid religious charities. It advises expanding the number of social-service vouchers, doing more to teach small nonprofit groups management and other administrative skills, and increasing partnerships with corporations, foundations, and state and local governments.

Mr. Obama has said he will keep the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, though he plans to rename it and refocus its work.

In addition, he promised to reverse a contentious Bush administration rule that allows faith-based groups that receive federal grants to discriminate based on religion when hiring employees.

Read The Chronicle’s article about how Mr. Obama’s is expected to change the faith-based initiative. (A paid subscription or free temporary pass is required to view the article.)