[Mb-civic] Grants Flow To Bush Allies On Social Issues - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Grants Flow To Bush Allies On Social Issues
Federal Programs Direct At Least $157 Million

By Thomas B. Edsall
The Washington Post
Wednesday, March 22, 2006; A01

For years, conservatives have complained about what they saw as the 
liberal tilt of federal grant money. Taxpayer funds went to abortion 
rights groups such as Planned Parenthood to promote birth control, and 
groups closely aligned with the AFL-CIO got Labor Department grants to 
run worker-training programs.

In the Bush administration, conservatives are discovering that turnabout 
is fair play: Millions of dollars in taxpayer funds have flowed to 
groups that support President Bush's agenda on abortion and other social 
issues.

Under the auspices of its religion-based initiatives and other federal 
programs, the administration has funneled at least $157 million in 
grants to organizations run by political and ideological allies, 
according to federal grant documents and interviews.

An example is Heritage Community Services in Charleston, S.C. A decade 
ago, Heritage was a tiny organization with deeply conservative social 
philosophy but not much muscle to promote it. An offshoot of an 
antiabortion pregnancy crisis center, Heritage promoted abstinence 
education at the county fair, local schools and the local Navy base. The 
budget was $51,288.

By 2004, Heritage Community Services had become a major player in the 
booming business of abstinence education. Its budget passed $3 million 
-- much of it in federal grants distributed by Bush's Department of 
Health and Human Services -- supporting programs for students in middle 
school and high school in South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky.

Among other new beneficiaries of federal funding during the Bush years 
are groups run by Christian conservatives, including those in the 
African American and Hispanic communities. Many of the leaders have been 
active Republicans and influential supporters of Bush's presidential 
campaigns.

Programs such as the Compassion Capital Fund, under the Health and Human 
Services, are designed to support religion-based social services, a goal 
that inevitably funnels money to organizations run by people who share 
Bush's conservative cultural agenda.

"If what you are asking is, has George Bush as president of the United 
States established priorities in spending for his administration? The 
answer is yes," said Wade F. Horn, who as assistant secretary for 
children and families at HHS oversees much of the spending going to 
conservative groups. "That is a prerogative that presidents have."

Horn and other officials said politics has not played a role in making 
grants. "Whoever got these grants wrote the best applications, and the 
panels in rating these grants rated them objectively, based on the 
criteria we published in the Federal Register," he said. "Whether they 
support the president or not is not a test in any of my grant programs."

"These are just slush funds for conservative interest groups," countered 
Bill Smith, vice president of the Sexuality Information and Education 
Council of the United States, one of the most outspoken critics of 
abstinence-only sex-education programs. "These organizations would not 
be in existence if not for the federal dollars coming through."

H. James Towey, director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and 
Community Initiatives, said politics plays no role in grant-making 
decisions. "We don't have that kind of calculation," he said.

Most, but not all, of the money going to conservative groups has come 
from two programs that did not exist before Bush took office in 2001. 
The Compassion Capital Fund, which distributed $148.3 million from 2002 
to 2005, was created "to expand the role that faith-based and community 
groups play in providing social services to those in need," according to 
the White House.

The Community-Based Abstinence Education grant program was enacted by 
Congress in 2001, and $391.7 million has been appropriated for it.

Beneficiaries of more than $2 million each from the compassion fund 
include five organizations run by black and Hispanic leaders who 
endorsed Bush and Operation Blessing, a charity run by television 
evangelist Pat Robertson. It has received $23.5 million, which includes 
$1.5 million from the Compassion Capital Fund and $22 million in surplus 
dry milk from the Agriculture Department.

Hundreds of struggling antiabortion and pregnancy crisis centers have 
received federal grants that often doubled or tripled their annual 
budgets, allowing them to branch out and hire staff, especially for 
abstinence education.

The Door of Hope Pregnancy Care Center in Madisonville, Ky., a small 
outfit of four part-time employees committed "to the belief in the 
sanctity of human life, primarily as it relates to the protection of the 
unborn," operated on an annual budget of $75,000 to $79,000, most of it 
raised from an annual banquet and a "walk for life." Last year, Door of 
Hope got an abstinence education grant of $317,017, allowing it to hire 
staff and expand.

In Dyersburg, Tenn., the Life Choices Pregnancy Support Center, where 
the staff believes "without reservation or qualification that the 
Scriptures teach that human life begins at conception," had revenue of 
$81,621 and could pay Executive Director Natalie Wilson $12,247 in 2001. 
Two years later, the center got a $534,339 grant for abstinence 
education. By 2004, annual revenue totaled $617,355.

Altogether, local antiabortion and crisis pregnancy centers have 
received well over $60 million in grants for abstinence education and 
other programs, according to a Post review of federal records.

The distribution of new money to conservative organizations is a small 
part of an estimated flood of $2 billion a year in federal grants to 
religious and religiously affiliated organizations. For decades, in 
Democratic and Republican administrations, well over $1 billion annually 
has been going to such groups, most of it to mainline organizations such 
as Catholic Charities, the Salvation Army and Lutheran Social Services.

The shift under Bush in part grows out of the administration's Faith and 
Community Based Initiative. Under the initiative, White House officials 
and new offices in 10 Cabinet-level departments have aggressively sought 
to widen the "pool" of applicants for federal grants for all kinds. 
Faith-based organizations are encouraged to apply for grants to operate 
Head Start and subsidized housing programs.

In a Dec. 12, 2002, executive order, Bush addressed one of the major 
concerns of religious groups considering applying for public money. Bush 
declared that religious groups receiving federal grants would not be 
required to comply with certain civil rights statutes, and could 
discriminate by hiring employees of specific religious faiths.

Skepticism about the distribution of money under the religion-based 
initiatives abounds in both parties.

Rep. Mark Edward Souder (R-Ind.), chairman of the Government Reform 
subcommittee on criminal justice, drug policy and human resources, said 
the effort "has gone political."

"Quite frankly, part of the reason it went political is because we can't 
sell it unless we can show Republicans a political advantage to it, 
because it's not our base," he said, referring to the fact that many of 
those receiving social services are Democratic voters.

Rep. Chet Edwards (D-Tex.) was more outspoken. "I believe ultimately 
this will be seen as one of the largest patronage programs in American 
history," he said.

The Compassion Capital Fund has disbursed many multiyear grants of $1.5 
million to $7.5 million to groups designated as "intermediary 
organizations" empowered, according to the White House to "issue 
sub-awards directly to qualified faith- and community-based organizations."

In effect, this designation turns the recipient organization into a 
major dispenser of federal money.

The Institute for Youth Development in Sterling, which is run by 
Shepherd Smith and his wife, Anita M. Smith, has been awarded $7.5 
million over three years. In turn, the institute has parceled out $4.5 
million of the federal money in grants of $5,000 to $50,000 to smaller 
organizations.

Shepherd Smith, who was a top strategist in Pat Robertson's 1988 
presidential bid, said the institute's grants were "not an effort on my 
part to make the right stronger; this was an effort to help little 
people" who have difficulty getting access to federal money.

The recipients listed on the institute's Web site include many socially 
conservative groups, among them at least 15 pregnancy crisis and 
counseling centers that oppose abortion.

The Rev. Luis Cortés's Esperanza USA has received three $2.5 million 
grants. Cortés is an evangelical Protestant; many of the grants from his 
organization have gone to Protestant Hispanic providers.

Among organizations run by ordained ministers, every Latino group 
receiving a large grant is headed by a Protestant. Protestant Hispanics 
are a key Republican target constituency. From 2000 to 2004, Bush's 
support among Hispanic Protestants grew from 44 percent to 54 percent, 
while remaining unchanged among Hispanic Roman Catholics, according to 
the Pew Hispanic Center.

In Milwaukee, a 2004 presidential battleground state, Pentecostal Bishop 
Sedgwick Daniels's Holy Redeemer Institutional Church of God in Christ 
was awarded $626,598 in 2003 and $824,471 in 2004 from the Compassion 
Capital Fund. Daniels, a Bush supporter, was a 2004 Republican National 
Convention delegate.

In Florida, another presidential battleground state, the National Center 
for Faith Based Initiatives, run by one of Bush's earliest 2000 
supporters in the black community, Bishop Harold Calvin Ray, has 
received $1.75 million over three years from the compassion fund.

HHS is not the only department making such grants.

The Education Department awarded a $750,000 discretionary grant to the 
GEO Foundation, run by Kevin Teasley, a former staffer at the 
libertarian Reason Foundation and conservative Heritage Foundation, and 
conservative Center for the Study of Popular Culture, to "provide 
outreach and information" on public-school choice. The department also 
awarded $1.5 million over three years to the conservative Black Alliance 
for Educational Options, which was created in 2000 with support from 
such funders on the right as the Bradley, John M. Olin and Walton Family 
foundations, to provide information about the No Child Left Behind Act.

In addition to liberals, there are conservative critics of taxpayer 
funding of groups on the right.

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, said the 
grant-making is "corrupting."

"The danger is that any group that gets money from the government will 
end up serving the interests of the state rather than the constituencies 
they are trying to serve," he said. "The guy who writes the check writes 
the rules."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/21/AR2006032101723.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060322/ff84e056/attachment.htm