DiIulio exits Beltway

Christian Century, August 29, 2001 by John Dart

JOHN J. DIIULIO JR.--a Democrat in the Republican White House and, as he once put it, "an Italian Catholic bull in an evangelical china shop"--is leaving his faith-based office amid praise for promoting honestly a Bush proposal that continues to engender suspicions.

DiIulio, 43, who took the post of director for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives on a temporary basis, became the first senior aide to leave the Bush administration. He had considerable frustrations during the last seven months trying to satisfy the religious right and left on what legal stipulations were needed for church and other faith groups to receive federal grants for social service.

Even as DiIulio announced his resignation plans August 16, a small firestorm arose over a provision in the House-passed bill for issuing vouchers to the needy instead of direct grants to social agencies. If the Senate, where a similar bill is in doubt, were to agree with that provision, analysts fear that church-state safeguards would be endangered and service providers would face planning chaos.

Also on August 16, the White House released a study by five government departments that listed 15 barriers to religious and community organizations that seek federal grants. "I think what the report tells us is that we have a lot of work to do in the way of government reform if we're going to realize our aspirations ... for fair and effective federal and social service contracting," DiIulio said at a forum discussing the report at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

A Philadelphian on leave from the University of Pennsylvania, DiIulio often commuted to Washington and accepted countless speaking invitations to defend or explain the Bush proposal. But because of the "intense interest in this initiative," he was constantly on call with the result that "it has been a terrible strain on his family," said Stanley Carlson-Thies, White House associate director for cabinet affairs who wrote a summary of the reported barriers.

As for his departure, DiIulio told Cox Newspapers that he agreed "to help launch the initiative, [and] help mobilize people who would not be traditional friends and allies." Referring to his past academic research and organizing work with urban groups, he added: "I want to go back to being part of the direct action with the people and faith-based groups that help them."

John Bridgeland, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, called DiIulio "both sage and saint" and said he would be missed, DiIulio's departure "is bound to hurt the initiative," John Green, a University of Akron authority on religious voting patterns, told the Los Angeles Times. Yet, Green added. "it may be the time has come that someone with more Washington experience" is needed.

DiIulio made conservative evangelicals unhappy when he said that groups that mix religious services and proselytization with helping the needy could not be recipients of government grants. Liberal critics, meanwhile, have sought to ensure that laws barring discrimination in hiring are not overridden by new legislation, and they have contended there is still room for mischief in the faith-based initiative. "I can't blame him [DiIulio] for leaving," said Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. "I wish he'd take the faith-based initiative with him."

People for the American Way likewise disagreed with DiIulio on the wisdom of the administration's proposals but conceded that he understood the problems with "religious indoctrination," said Ralph Neas, president of the watchdog group. However, Neas called H.R. 7, the House version of the Bush initiative that passed in July, "a constitutional nightmare that would promote taxpayer-funded discrimination."

The House bill also contains a I "stealth provision" to permit the use of vouchers given directly to the needy instead of making grants to faith-based organizations, according to Marvin Olasky, who is credited with conceptualizing Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as motto and policy. Olasky reported in the evangelical World magazine that some top White House aides have rejoiced because a voucher provision in H.R. 7 "passed without attracting much attention, since debate centered on direct grants." A paragraph slipped into the bill gives secretaries of the five federal departments the authority to "direct the disbursement of some or all of the funds" in the form of vouchers, wrote Olasky, whose article in the August 4 World relied in part on unnamed White House sources.

Olasky later said that DiIulio was "initially helpful" to the faith-based cause, reported the Los Angeles Times. "I think we've learned that the direct grant approach isn't going to work," Olasky said, who favors instead methods such as vouchers that allow individual recipients to choose a social service.

Alarm about the "little-noted provision" for vouchers was raised from the audience by an official with a low-income housing organization August 17 at a faith-based program discussion organized by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life "This notion of voucherization seems to run counter to the rhetoric supporting community-based and faith-based organizations," said Richelle Friedman, a senior policy associate with the McAuley Institute founded by the Sisters of Mercy.