Bush Defends Plan on Faith-Based Groups

By HARVY LIPMAN

President Bush and his top advisers on charity issues spent much of last

week defending the administration’s plans to help religious groups obtain federal money to pay for their social-service programs.

While liberal groups continued to raise questions about the plans’ constitutionality, a growing list of conservatives joined the ranks of critics, but over different concerns. Christian conservative Pat Robertson, writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, raised concerns that federal money would end up going to what he considers non-mainstream religions, such as the Church of Scientology. He and other conservatives also objected to possible government restrictions on religious elements of some programs.

And Don Eberly, deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, suggested that the administration’s plans are likely to be postponed. He was quoted in The Washington Post last week as saying that the president’s proposal “may need to be corrected in some areas.”

But Mr. Bush took strong objection to any suggestions that his faith-based initiatives may be losing momentum. “Reports about our charitable-choice legislation not going full steam ahead are just simply not true,” he said during a visit to an after-school program run by a religious group in New Jersey. “We’re moving on a timetable that we’re comfortable with. And part of our faith-based initiative was to make sure we take a full inventory of programs that now exist within the federal government.”

John J. DiIulio Jr., head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, also said plans were moving forward. He filled in some of the details of the president’s plan, and answered critics, in a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals, in Dallas.

Legislation to put a key part of the president’s faith-based plans in place is expected to be introduced this month. The proposal would expand the charitable-choice provision that became law in 1996. The provision would encourage religious groups to apply for money to help welfare recipients by allowing the organizations to play by slightly different rules than the ones that govern other recipients of federal money. For example, religious groups that got government money from programs covered by the provision would be permitted to make hiring decisions based on a person’s religious beliefs.

Two Congressmen — Reps. J.C. Watts, Republican of Oklahoma, and Tony Hall, Democrat of Ohio — plan to introduce legislation this month that would encourage religious organizations to apply for federal money from a wide range of programs to pay for their social-service work.

The timing is less clear in the Senate. Sen. Rick Santorum, a Pennsylvania Republican and a key promoter of Mr. Bush’s faith-based plans, announced last week that he would not be introducing his bill to expand charitable choice for several weeks, but would propose legislation this month granting new tax incentives for charitable giving.

Alternative Structures

The administration has also been responding to the growing number of people who agree with Mr. Bush’s overall goal of increasing aid to religious charities but who urge that the administration adopt different approaches to accomplishing that goal.

Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor and a senior fellow at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty — as well as an informal adviser to the president on charity issues — says he has recommended that the administration consider giving vouchers to needy people that they could exchange for services, instead of making government grants to congregations that provide the services. He says he also recommends creating a charitable income-tax credit as a way to encourage people to give more to faith-based organizations.

“Then it will all turn around, because those represent individual choice rather than government direction,” says Mr. Olasky.

Michael Horowitz, a fellow at the Hudson Institute, also supports a voucher program, but he says that not all conservatives do.

“A lot of religious groups just want the bucks,” he says. “There are also some conservative members of Congress who see this in pork-barrel terms, who think that the secular groups on the left have been getting government grants for years, and why not have our side get some of that pork.”

Even if the administration and religious conservatives come together over the voucher approach, however, liberal opponents of the plan won’t be satisfied.

“We regard vouchers as a form of direct government funding,” says Robert Boston, assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Mr. Boston argues that such vouchers would be equivalent to giving federal funds to religious schools, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional.

“There is a solution,” says Mr. Boston. “Catholic Charities, for example, receives a large amount of government funding. They do not proselytize, they do not discriminate on religious grounds, and they are quite willing to open up their books to government audits. So do many Protestant and Jewish organizations. If President Bush just would expand on that idea, we could move forward.”