A Turning Point for the White House’s Effort to Aid Religious Charities

The announcement that H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, will be leaving in June marks a turning point in the Bush administration’s most distinctive domestic-policy effort. But less certain is what the future holds in store for the plan to steer more governmental and private support to religious charities.

Mr. Towey’s departure has attracted a great deal of comment about the White House’s failures to increase federal grants to religious charities or persuade Congress to pass legislation that enables such organizations to expand their social services and other nonreligious programs.

Some critics, including a former aide to Mr. Towey, have accused the Bush administration of abandoning the effort. However, the real story is more complicated than that, and the measures of success are less obvious, but no less important, than changes in federal laws or spending.

Indeed, so central to the Bush administration’s early objectives was the effort to help religious charities that it could hardly have lived up to the expectations for it. In 1999, in one of his first policy speeches as a presidential candidate, Mr. Bush pledged to “rally the armies of compassion” to reduce “poverty and hopelessness,” a theme he invoked frequently during his campaign.

One week after taking office in 2001, he signed an executive order establishing an office for the program in the White House and satellite outposts in five major Cabinet departments. (Eleven are now operating.)

He also nominated one of the principal architects of governmental programs to support religious groups, Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis, to serve as a board member of the Corporation for National and Community Service, in order to engage AmeriCorps and its other programs in projects run by religious groups. (A few months later, I enlisted to run the day-to-day activities of the agency.)

Another designer, John DiIulio, was induced to leave a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania to join the White House staff, where he quickly assembled a team of knowledgeable and enthusiastic associates.

Then the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, changed everything. Even before then, however, the faith-based office had encountered choppy waters.

Its legislative proposals — which consisted of measures to promote increased giving and to expand the number of federal social programs operating under “charitable choice” rules that let religious charities compete more easily for funds — came under criticism, largely from civil libertarians worried about religious grantees discriminating against those who did not share their beliefs.

From its own supporters on the religious right, concerned that the federal effort might entangle faith-based charities in too much bureaucracy, came calls for the White House to rethink its approach. And amid political controversies, Mr. DiIulio quit, less than a year after he had begun, citing health problems.

Mr. Towey was able to stabilize the program and keep it high on the White House agenda, even as the Bush administration became increasingly preoccupied with foreign-policy matters — and that is a significant accomplishment.

Although he could not overcome Congressional roadblocks to enacting legislation, Mr. Towey was able to use a combination of presidential orders, administrative procedures, and new programs to make federal agencies friendlier to religious and grass-roots charities.

Mr. Towey’s extensive outreach effort has quieted criticism from the conservative religious world, while also informing groups interested in obtaining government funds of what government contracts would allow — and not allow — them to do.

Still, if measured by increased spending on faith-based charities, the results are ambiguous.

In February, a report from the Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York at Albany found that the percentage of grants awarded to religious charities by 99 federal programs increased slightly — from 11.8 percent in 2002 to 12.8 percent in 2004 — and the share of funds changed not at all (while the dollars they received declined).

The White House took issue with this assessment, saying that the number of grants to religious organizations rose by 38 percent from 2003 to 2005 in the five Cabinet departments that were the focus of President Bush’s efforts to help such groups.

However, those awards amounted to just 10.3 percent of the funds the agencies had available, and at least some of the grants came from programs newly created by the Bush administration, rather than from those that had previously been primarily supporting secular organizations.

Such figures are not particularly meaningful. Government grants have long gone to organizations sponsored by religious groups, such as Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army, which provide social services, run homeless shelters, and conduct other nonreligious activities.

They, as well as organizations such as Habitat for Humanity, which are nominally faith-based, appear to have gained the most from the Bush administration’s efforts, not the congregations or intensely spiritual local charities that many hoped — or feared — would be its primary beneficiaries.

Nor do spending figures capture the complex relationships between secular charities, which often have the desire and organizational capacity to seek and manage government funds, and the myriad faith-based ones, which actually wind up spending the money to work with the people in need of help.

Perhaps the most significant accomplishment of the Bush administration has been to give greater visibility and legitimacy to partnerships between religious groups, other nonprofit groups, and government, and to more generally highlight the role that religious charities play in American life.

By the White House’s count, 32 governors and more than 100 mayors have set up their own offices to promote collaboration with religious groups. And these efforts cut across party lines, with support coming from leaders with impeccable records as civil libertarians, such as New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who recently declared that if elected governor, he would increase that state’s reliance on religious groups.

What happens next will depend on what state and local officials do, as much as on whom the White House can get to take over the office Mr. Towey leaves to become a college president. As he departs, Jim Towey can take satisfaction in knowing that under his leadership, a major presidential program that was in danger of collapsing has not only survived, but planted seeds that may help it grow.

Leslie Lenkowsky is professor of public affairs and philanthropic studies at Indiana University and a regular contributor to these pages. His e-mail address is llenkows@iupui.edu.