Transcript
MR. RON NESSEN: Good afternoon, and welcome to Brookings. My name is Ron Nessen and I want to welcome you to this forum, at which the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives will issue a report on Barriers to Faith-Based Organizations. And our panel will examine and discuss the findings.
The survey that is being announced today is called Unlevel Playing Field, it's the result of Executive Order signed in January by President George W. Bush, five Cabinet agencies, Education, HHS, HUD, Justice and Labor conducted a department-wide audit to identify barriers that discourage and disadvantage the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the delivery of social services. You should have gotten copies of the findings right outside along with other material about today's report.
I want to welcome those who are watching on C-SPAN, and I also want to welcome those who are watching and listening to the live web cast on the Brookings web site. You'll find on the web site transcripts of this event, archived video and audio of the event, and a lot of background information on this issue. The web site is at www.brookings.edu.
The format for today is that, first of all, John DiIulio, who is the director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives; John Bridgeland, who is the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council; and Stanley Carlson-Thies, the White House Associate Director for Cabinet Affairs, will present and explain the findings of this cabinet department audit. We had thought that John Goldsmith was coming—that Steve Goldsmith was coming, but unfortunately at the last minute, we found out that he will not be able to come.
We also have representatives of the Cabinet departments here with us today.
After the results of the survey are presented, our panel, which consists of Jonathan Rauch, a guest scholar here at Brookings and a columnist for the National Journal; Melissa Rogers, the executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life; and Sebastian Mallaby of the editorial board of the Washington Post will comment, will ask questions, and generally engage in a discussion with our panel. As I said, the White House folks need to be back at the White House for a meeting at 3:00. So we're going to move this along very rapidly. We hope all of our panelists will keep their remarks brief so that we can do that.
And so, to begin, John DiIulio, John Bridgeland, and Stanley Carlson-Thies.
MR. JOHN BRIDGELAND: Thank you very much, Ron.
And welcome everyone. Thanks also to the Brookings Institution for hosting this forum. I must say, I'm delighted to see so much interest in an issue that the president and the American public care so deeply about. Today we are releasing a report that represents the work of five Cabinet departments, and I want to thank the Cabinet centers for all the work they have done. It does identify 15 principal barriers to the participation by faith-based and community organizations in federal social service programs. But, before we get into the details, and John and Stanley talk more comprehensively about the findings of the report, I wanted to take a moment and step back to put this in a larger context.
In July of 1999, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Cincinnati, Ohio, then Governor and Presidential Candidate Bush announced his armies of the compassionate initiative. I was with him in Cincinnati, where we went to an inner city church that had been built with the work and people in that community that were offering mentoring programs, drug prevention programs, and hope in an area that had once been a marketplace for drug and crack use. It was one of dozens of places of sacred places that the president saw bringing hope to communities left behind. Sacred places serving viable public purposes.
His armies of compassion initiative had three fundamental goals. First, to expand charitable giving, principally through a charitable deduction to the 80 million Americans who currently do not itemize.
Second, to eliminate federal barriers, to level the playing field for faith-based community organizations consistent with the principles of government neutrality, and fully consistent with both the establishment and free exercise clauses of the Constitution.
And finally to focus, most importantly, on achieving results, launching initiatives that would 15 million young Americans who are at risk of not reaching productive adulthood, the 1.5 million children today who have a mom or a dad in prison, and the millions of Americans who are caught in a cycle of violence and drug abuse all across this country.
This thoughtful report is the outgrowth of the president's charge in his executive order earlier this year to conduct audits to identify and eliminate these federal barriers.
Let me just highlight for a moment some notable findings. First, this report shows systematically that government has been hostile to the participation of faith-based and community-based organizations when it ought to have been neutral. It states that the First Amendment both secures religious liberty and protects against government establishment of religion, but when it comes to federal social services government has focused more on avoiding the latter than honoring the former.
Second, federal programs have not sufficiently focused on achieving results. It highlights the failure to comply with the Government Performance and Results Act, the failure to adequately implement charitable choice, and instead of asking who you are, federal officials should be asking, what can you do, and how well can you do it.
It also highlights the fact that charitable choice, which president recommended expanding to juvenile justice programs, crime prevention programs, drug prevention programs, services for the elderly, hunger relief, has passed by bipartisan majorities in the Congress and been signed into the law by President Clinton four times. These bills do not change the civil rights landscape, and faith-based organizations cannot discriminate against employees or beneficiaries on the basis of race, national origin, gender, age or disability.
And let me make clear, faith-based organizations also have a protected civil right to take religion into account in their hiring, which Congress passed this protection in 1964, expanded it in 1972, and it was upheld by a unanimous Supreme Court in 1987, nine to zero.
Recently, at the U.S. Conference of Mayors event in Detroit, President Bush ran into a young man, Demarco Howard. He's a 16-year-old boy living in Detroit, his father is in prison, his mother has a drug addiction problem. But for the intervention of the Rosedale Baptist Church that had a mentoring program, the life prospects for that young man were dim. Today, he's getting an education, has role models in his life, and is volunteering to help other kid who could have suffered his same fate.
And, in the end, that is what this is all about. We have a rich tradition in America of faith-based and local community groups who are closest to the needs of citizens meeting those needs. People who share the same zip code as you, who know your families, your neighborhoods, who are best positioned to offer a hand. And President Bush wants to ensure that the unlevel playing field that exists in government social service programs today becomes a level one. And, in his own words, the paramount goal is compassionate results in private and charitable groups, including religious ones, should have the fullest opportunity permitted by law to compete on a level playing field so long as they achieve valid public purposes consistent with the bedrock principles of pluralism, nondiscrimination, even-handedness, and neutrality.
MR. JOHN J. DiIULIO: Thank you very much, Bridge. And I want to thank the Brookings Institution, thank Ron, and thank President Mike Armacost, and my Brookings colleague Tom Mann and others for inviting us aboard, and thank member of our distinguished panel, including Melissa, who is smiling at me from across the transmitter.
I want to offer my remarks very much in the spirit of an old Brookings public administration hand, or hound as the case may be. I will say a bit about what's in the report, and how it motivates these comments, but we're going to leave the major task of summarizing the report to our colleague, Dr. Stanley Carlson-Thies, who led the effort of the White House Office of Faith and Community Initiatives to pull together and summarize the findings of these five Cabinet center reports.
Those who may be interested in the actual 800-plus pages of those Cabinet center reports, get them available from the individual Cabinet agencies.
I noticed on the way in that Brookings had taken the liberty of putting on the table out there a couple of the books that I edited during my time directing the Brookings Center for Public Management. These are classic works of public administration. They are Brookings books of the kind that once you put them down, you cannot pick them up. I didn't say that. I produced many such books during my time here. And the one that I think I was proudest of was the one that was the shortest, and that was a book which we did back in 1993 at the start of Vice President Gore's Reinventing Government, National Performance Review Effort, with my colleague from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and a co-director of the center here at the time, Don Kettl, and the late great Princeton scholar Jerry Garvey, and that book was called Improving Government Performance: An Owner's Manual.
And the reason I harken back to that report today, that book today, is because it's been very much in my mind, that line of work, over the past several months as I've listened to Dr. Stanley and talked to Cabinet center colleagues about what they were in the process of learning and finding through their explorations of their respective agencies. The single most important underappreciated fact about contemporary American governance and public administration, we argued then and I triply believe now, is the fact that most of what the federal government does in the way of domestic policy programming is administered not by federal civil servants themselves, but by vast networks, rather complicated networks, referred to by my colleague Don Kettle as government by proxy networks, networks of state and local government employees, for profit firms, and nonprofit organizations.
The work of translating federal programs, including in the area of social services, into administrative action is very much the work of non-governmental employees. Brookings colleague here and old friend Paul Light is probably the leading expert, is the leading expert in the country on this, and he has estimated that for every one federal civil servant who administers these programs, there are as many as six people who indirectly for Washington and the administration of federal social services. So, this fact of government by proxy is kind of the overarching fact and the context within which I believe this report Unlevel Playing Field needs to be situated.
Another key fact, a bit of important context is that government contracting with nonprofits in particular, nonprofit organizations, has grown rather dramatically since the turn of the century. In 1970, it was about 25 percent of all government contracting total public social service expenditures. By 1980, it had risen to 50 percent. So nonprofit organizations are really the vital hands and feet in the delivery of federal social service programs. That is how the job, as it were, gets done.
And one of the main findings, again, that Dr. Stanley Carlson-Thies will talk about in more detail in summarizing the report, but one of the main findings that stands out will not be a surprise to my friend Don Kettle, or to other public administration scholars, or to people who follow this sort of thing, because we have known for many years, it has been perhaps the single most consistent finding in the literature that the nonprofit organizations that are tasked that win the social services contracts are funded in whole or in part by Washington are generally very large. It doesn't matter whether they're religious organization or secular organizations, they're big. The tend to be big, and they tend to be national.
If I may quote from a recent study by my dear colleague at Harvard, Professor Mary Jo Bane, an excellent edited volume entitled Who Will Provide, a study of the social service delivery mechanisms and the role of faith and community organizations therein, an essay in that volume by analyst Peter Frumpkin, and I'm quoting him now, notes that "even as many smaller community-based nonprofits aspire to secure public funding, they often face serious managerial and political obstacles to that goal, so that at all levels of government, as well as in the intergovernmental social services delivery networks, a relatively select group of large social service and health nonprofits have long received the bulk of public funding."
Now, what explains this government grassroots gap as it were? People have puzzled over that for quite some time, and one of the reasons they puzzled over and debated it for so long is that the data necessary to provide definitive answers to that question really are not in existence. The federal government does not now have, and has not had the kind of excellent data systems on procurement practices, government performance and results, as Mr. Bridgeland just mentioned, despite the enactment in 1993 of the Government Performance and Results Act. And, yes, if you read those Brookings books, it will tell you that that was going to cure the problem, so that by the year 2000 all would be well, and the lion would lay down with the lamb, and social services would be provided efficiently. That was Kettle's part of the discussion. I didn't write that part.
But, that hasn't happened. The Gipper has not led, and the General Accounting Office has studied this as well. Others have looked at it. Kettle himself in one of those volumes, a very extensive, close, analytical look included the same. The Gipper hasn't been effective because, you know, we don't have the data systems, we really can't do very much. So the data aren't there.
But to the extent that we do have data, and what I really value, again, from this standpoint about this report Unlevel Playing Field is that it adds to our rather limited stock of empirical information and data and knowledge about exactly how the system works.
What it does add and what it does suggest is that some of the reasons why people—some of the conventional reasons given for why this gap exists probably do not hold water. One of the most common explanations is that, in fact, people don't reall