Former Bush Official Blasts ‘Faith’ Program

A new book by the former deputy director of the Bush administration’s “faith-based” program claims the grants awarded as part of the program are doing little to shore up the religious charities they were created to help, and have instead turned into a vehicle of reward for only those charities that share a particular kind of conservative ideology, reports The Washington Post. The book, Tempting Faith, was written by David Kuo, who served in the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives from 2000 to 2003.

Mr. Kuo, who labels himself a conservative Christian, lays much of the blame on the peer-review panel that rates charities that apply for grants. “They were supposed to review the applications in a religiously neutral fashion. . . . But their biases were transparent,” Mr. Kuo writes. Panel members, according to Mr. Kuo, were chosen by the Department of Health and Human Services and included about 100 evangelical Christians from think tanks, foundations, and major nonprofit organizations.

A former speechwriter for the Republican politicians Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, and a former domestic policy adviser to then-senator John D. Ashcroft, Mr. Kuo was recently diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor and says he has five or 10 years left to live. He said he wrote the book because he thinks “what is important is to be able to warn Christians about politics, that they should not throw so much at politics because they’re being used.”

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