White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
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The White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) is a department under the Office of the President of the United States that was established by President George W. Bush through executive order on January 29, 2001, and which represents one of the key domestic policies of Bush's campaign promise of "compassionate conservatism." The initiative seeks to strengthen faith-based and community organizations and expand their capacity to provide federally-funded social services, with the idea being that these groups are well-situated to meet the needs of local individuals.
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- The most comprehensive analysis of the distribution of faith-based funds was done by the Associated Press in 2005. AP looked at grants handed out in 2003 by five federal departments — Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Education, Labor, and Justice. Money given to the states for distribution wasn't included. Besides analyzing the figures, AP reporters conducted 150 interviews with recipients in thirty states. It then published a state-by-state list of grant recipients. Out of more than 1600 grantees, around 50 were Jewish, 5 were Muslim, and 1 was Buddhist... Small grants to non-Christian groups allow Bush and his supporters to speak of faith-based initiatives in pluralistic terms, but they don't change the essentially sectarian nature of "compassionate conservatism."
- Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, 1st ed. (W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 121
- Amazingly, the administration seems to have no central tally of how much federal money is going to religious groups, or what's being done with it. "They want to do everything they can to avoid particular, number-crunching evaluation," Billy Terry, a consultant who has sat on several of the federal panels that review faith-based grant applicants, told me. "They couldn't evaluate what they've done if they wanted to. There's no data. There's no structure." Even DiIulio, the first head of the faith-based office, eventually concluded that the program was meant to help the Bush base, not the poor. "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus," he famously told Esquire reporter Ron Suskind. "What you've got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
- Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, 1st ed. (W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 121
- There is one ill that faith-based programs are proven to ameliorate — unemployment among Christian evangelicals. The Christianization of the safety net has created a kind of affirmative action for the born again. That's because the Bush administration decreed faith-based groups exempt from a 1965 executive order that bars religious discrimination in federally funded hiring. As a result, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, gay people, secularists, and others can't compete for a growing number of social service jobs.
- Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, 1st ed. (W. W. Norton., 2006), p. 128
