The White House Office of Faith Based and Community Initiatives (OFBCI) has gone to great lengths to justify its own worth. Forget for a moment that its existence seems to come eerily close to violating the Establishment Clause—best understood, though often miscited, as the “separation of church and state” clause.  And forget that the OFCBI’s official report—The Quiet Revolution, which credits the office with “tackling society's toughest problems”— sounds more like a movement among communist librarians than an exercise in self-evaluation.  Even then, the OFBCI seems an agency lacking concrete results or any semblance of oversight.

With his first two Executive Orders, fledgling President George W. Bush created the OFBCI.  Its mission was twofold: to “ensure a level playing field for faith-based organizations,” and to wage “a determined attack on need.”  To accomplish this, the office distributes money via federal grants to religious and non-religious community organizations to combat the alleged injustice that faith-based organizations were not previously entitled to federal funding.

In evaluating itself in the Quiet Revolution, the OFBCI details its activities without ever really considering the difference between activity and success.  The report instead concerns itself with answering the question “How does the OFBCI award grants?” rather than “How well does it award grants?”

Since the OFBCI functions not as a “stand-alone office,” but as a program “embedded…within Federal agencies that administer human service programs” it can be difficult to monitor.  In real terms, the office funds 134 programs at 11 Federal agencies, in addition to offices in 35 states and over 100 cities, all in the executive branch.  In 2006, it distributed $12.56 billion in awards among 10,664 secular nonprofits and $2.18 billion to 2,300 faith-based nonprofits.

Since 2003, the total number of awards to faith-based groups increased 41% (from 1,634), while awards to secular groups only improved by 19% (from 8,942).  OFBCI views these numbers as progress in leveling the federal-grant-winning playing field, an end in of itself.

The Quiet Revolution does discuss numerous programs which appear to boast great success.  The 122-page document cites the President’s Prisoner ReEntry Initiative, which attempts to reduce recidivism by helping return nonviolent prisoners to work, showing a recidivism rate among participants that is half the national average.  

There is also the Access to Recovery program, providing substance abuse support to nearly 200,000 people with a rate of abstinence-upon-discharge higher than the national average; almost a third of these services were provided by faith-based organizations.  

And there is the President's Malaria Initiative—$1.2 billion to fight malaria that has utilized faith-based and community organizations to educate African community leaders and mobilize grassroots volunteers.  There are many such programs.

And yet, it is never made clear how much funding for these programs even came through the OFBCI; nowhere is it suggested that these programs would be lost without the OFBCI; absent is any indication that faith-based programs offered what others could not.  More importantly, it is never revealed what percentage of the OFBCI’s total operations these programs constitute, or what other offices contribute.  They can take credit for any successful Department of Justice or US Agency for International Development program without ever reporting what their specific role was in that success.

“The full picture of the FBCI's outcomes,” the report admits, will not be known until “the Faith-Based and Community Initiative Conference on Research, Outcomes & Evaluation” on June 26 - 27, 2008.  This admission is troubling. It reveals a lack of concrete internal measurements seven years since the OFBCI’s inception, with no effort to gauge actual effectiveness until recently.

Instead, the OFBCI works with the Office of Management and Budget (also a White House office) to set goals and “best practices” for each federal agency that distributes its grant money.  As a result, the OFBCI itself is never evaluated—only the agencies which distribute its money.  In other words, no governmental body has the authority to even ask the questions posed by this article, or by other concerned Americans.  

Wasteful spending comes from poor priorities, which is all that grows in the parched soil of unconstitutionality.  Normally in government, these concerns would be solved by the normal system of checks and balances when somebody perks up and asks, “Wait, where is this money going?”   The specific problem is that, with the way OFBCI is structured, only one body has the authority to ask this of the office—the office itself.

Wherever the White House gets its confidence in this office, it is surely not from concrete data, thorough evaluations, or yet-to-be-held conferences.  Perhaps, instead, it is faith-based.

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