UPON BEING NAMED DIRECTOR of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, John DiIulio Jr. made clear that he expected to be in the post for only a short while. Notes of my January interview with DiIulio begin: “Do at least six months.” DiIulio, as it turns out, will have done the job seven months—too long in the eyes of his many critics. An unabashed Democrat of prodigious intellect and energy, as well as a Catholic of evident conviction, DiIulio, who is a contributing editor to this magazine, drew fire from all sides. For the secular left, which dominates the leadership of his own party, DiIulio was too friendly to religion. For many on the right, including its religious conservatives, he was too friendly to big government, favoring as he did traditional grant-making over indirect assistance (such as tax credits and vouchers). Seeking to build broad-based support for President Bush’s project, DiIulio reached out to black and Hispanic pastors, only to incur the wrath of white evangelical leaders who thought their interests merited as much attention. DiIulio wanted significant Democratic support for the legislative piece of the project—a view that put him at odds with House Republicans, who wanted a bill this year even if few Democrats would vote for it. That was also the position of the president and his political aides, some of whom spoke critically of DiIulio in anonymous remarks to the press. In July, only 14 Democrats joined Republicans in passing H.R. 7, Bush’s faith-based bill, which now faces an uncertain future in the Democratic Senate. Health problems made it easy for DiIulio to stick with his original plan to leave now and return to his home in Philadelphia (he had commuted by train) and the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. But obviously he was frustrated in the job. DiIulio told Cox News’s Rebecca Carr, a reporter he saw as more evenhanded than most and who broke the story of his decision to leave, “I hate the nonsense that goes on here.” In our conversation, DiIulio described himself, happily, as “a free man.” He will go, having helped push the president’s project onto the national agenda, no mean feat. In retrospect it is apparent just how large and complicated DiIulio’s assignment was. Large because Bush’s faith-based initiative contemplates a massive shift in the way the nation provides social services—away from reliance upon large, often secular social-service providers and toward reliance upon smaller, community-based groups, many of them motivated by religious faith. The project is complicated because accomplishing such a shift requires not only new law but right administration of current law, as well as considerable outreach and exhortation—to big business and big foundations that, like big government, have long supported mainly the big providers. The project thus threatens well-established political alignments and the secular dominance of social services. In The Federalist, Alexander Hamilton viewed the presidency as the office uniquely constituted for the undertaking of “extensive and arduous enterprises” for the public good. George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative qualifies—more than any other of his policy proposals—as such an enterprise. DiIulio’s chief legacy may well be a report he released on August 14, the day he told Carr about his decision to leave. On January 29 the president issued an executive order establishing a “center” for the new undertaking in each of five departments—Justice, Education, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development. Bush directed the five centers to conduct department-wide audits of their programs in order to identify barriers to participation of faith-based and community organizations in the delivery of the agency’s social services. While the legislative fight over H.R. 7 dominated the faith-based news, the five centers quietly did their work. “Unlevel Playing Field,” DiIulio’s report, summarizes their findings. The report confirms that the government favors large providers over small ones in the award of social service contracts. Whether the government is directly awarding grants or passing funds to states and local governments for their distribution, the story from the five departments is the same: faith-based and other grass-roots groups receive very little. This funding gap can’t be explained on the grounds that big providers outperform smaller ones. The report points out that Washington doesn’t know much about the performance of the groups it already funds. Our big government happens to be ignorant government, notwithstanding a 1993 law demanding results-based management. “Only rarely are federal programs and grantees examined to determine whether taxpayer funds achieve the desired results.” And: “Virtually none of the programs has ever been subjected to a systematic evaluation of their performance that meets rigorous [or] even rudimentary evaluation research standards.” Part of the funding gap can be explained by reference to the small groups themselves: Some don’t want government funds for theological reasons, or they fear dependence on government or its regulatory tentacles, or they fear losing their soul (having gained the world, so to speak). “Unlevel Playing Field” shows, however, that those concerns can only explain so much. The report points to survey data suggesting that there are many small, faith-based organizations, particularly in urban areas, which don’t have these concerns and would be willing to administer federal social service programs in their neighborhoods. Many of the groups don’t know about the programs. And barriers await any that try to compete for them. The report identifies 15 barriers, such as overly complex applications and burdensome regulatory requirements. But most barriers concern religion. There is, says the report, “an overriding perception by federal officials that close collaboration with religious organizations is legally suspect.” Indeed, these officials “often seem stuck in a ‘no-aid,’ strict separationist framework.” For example, the Labor audit found that reviewers of grant applications assume that “Jefferson’s ‘wall of separation’ metaphor automatically disqualifies all but the most secularized providers.” The Education audit noted that an official believed the Constitution flatly forbids the use of grant funds even for activities that merely have a religious component. “Unlevel Playing Field” includes examples of federal programs that actually ban outright all religious organizations from applying for funding. Notably, the bias against religion exists even though many programs audited by the five departments are covered by the “charitable choice” laws passed since 1996. Charitable choice seeks to ensure that faith-based social service providers are not disadvantaged by virtue of their religious orientation but are allowed to compete for grants on the same basis as all others. Yet, says “Unlevel Playing Field,” the new charitable choice laws have been “almost entirely ignored by federal administrators.” Health and Human Services has more programs covered by charitable choice law than any other agency. Yet “it has done very little to apply the rules to its own grant making or to ensure that the state and local governments that received covered funds adjusted their own procurement rules to comply with the congressional directives.” DiIulio, a student of politics and public administration, says “implementation gaps” are common enough with new laws. “But what’s not common,” he adds, is to find such an egregious example of a law’s being ignored. Charitable choice, after all, “applies literally to scores of billions of dollars of welfare services. …This is a Grand Canyon of a gap.” A reader of “Unlevel Playing Field” might wonder why there should be more charitable choice if the charitable choice that now exists is largely unimplemented by a recalcitrant federal bureaucracy. As DiIulio put it to me: “Someone has to turn this into a
ction.” Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
