November 11, 2004 | Read Time: 3 minutes
The Bush administration and its conservative allies in Congress and elsewhere have stepped up efforts to stifle expression by nonprofit groups that disagree with government policies, says a new report by OMB Watch, a Washington advocacy group.
The report, “Continuing Attacks on Nonprofit Speech: Death by a Thousand Cuts II,” builds on arguments made in a similar report released by the group last year (The Chronicle, August 21, 2003), and offers examples of how specific charities allegedly have been wronged by the government.
In one illustration, the report says that two federal agencies dropped plans this year to give a total of $360,000 to the Global Health Council, a nonprofit group with offices in Washington and Vermont, to help pay for the organization’s annual conference of international public-health professionals, an event that the federal government has subsidized for decades.
According to the report, the administration said the money was withheld over concerns federal dollars would be used to lobby. Officials from the Global Health Council, however, say the administration did not approve of the conference agenda, which included the presentation of differing views on sex education and reproductive-health issues. The Bush administration, the report says, supports sex-education programs that teach abstinence only.
Such examples, the report says, “demonstrate the government’s willingness to force its point of view on nonprofits and take punitive action toward those that raise questions about those viewpoints.”
White House Response
The White House criticized the report’s release just days before last week’s presidential election.
Maria Tamburri, a White House spokeswoman, called OMB Watch “a consistent critic” of the Bush administration, and said that “the only thing that makes this report different is that its timing is so overtly politically motivated.” Without responding directly to the report’s charges, Ms. Tamburri said: “President Bush has been a champion of nongovernmental organizations through his faith-based and community initiatives.”
Some nonprofit experts also had criticisms of the report.
“OMB Watch is taking snips and snails and puppy-dog tails and trying to make them add up to a unified, sinister conspiracy on the part of the administration to suppress free speech,” William A. Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, wrote in an e-mail message. “And once more it fails.”
‘A Thousand Cuts’
The OMB Watch report says that the White House has not tried to pass legislation or approve regulations that would directly cut back the advocacy rights of nonprofit groups. However, it contends that a series of small steps the White House has taken together constitute the “death by a thousand cuts” of charities’ free-speech rights.
The report says those steps have accelerated in the last year and include such actions as retaliatory audits of nonprofit groups that opposed government policies, selective enforcement of laws, and an overly broad interpretation of the government’s authority to regulate nonprofit groups and charitable giving under homeland-security policies, including the USA Patriot Act. The Patriot Act, passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks, increases sanctions against people and organizations that support terrorism.
Nazih Hassan, president of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, in Michigan, said: “The mosque leadership has been quite vocal in its criticism of the wide net that has been cast over the Muslim community. We are very concerned about investigations of our members when we have done nothing wrong and merely spoken out when we disagreed with government actions.”
The full report is available online at http://www.ombwatch.org. Print copies may be obtained for $10 each, including shipping, by contacting OMB Watch, 1742 Connecticut Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20009; (202) 234-8494.
