Despite Bush's Happy Horseshit About Phenomenal Success of His "Faith-Based" Taxpayer Funded Initiative, Report Card Gives an F-Minus

Bush did his outright best to force down America's throat a "faith-based" initiative (complete with the ability to discriminate against who gets hired and who gets helped while collecting taxpayer dollars in a nation with rules against the same). But as Bill Berkowitz writes on Working for Change, the General Accounting Office (GAO) gives these programs an F-Minus (a good grade for Bush but pretty poor for anything else in reality).

Here's a bit:

"I am confident that the faith community is achieving unbelievable successes in -- throughout our country." -- President George W. Bush, second White House National Conference on Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, March 2006

"... while more elaborate scientific studies are underway, the White House has relied on largely anecdotal evidence to support the view that faith-based approaches produce better long-term results." -- Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy, August 2004
For years, President Bush has being going around the country touting his faith-based initiative, claiming that it has been achieving remarkable results delivering social services to the needy. Few reporters bothered to ask what the president he meant by "results."

Well, the results are in on the president's Faith-Based Initiative and it doesn't look good for Team Bush. A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has affirmed what many critics of President Bush faith-based initiative have long asserted: too many religious groups that have received government grants have been mixing religious activities with their social work; and the government has not yet established a concrete process to monitor grant recipients to see if they are being effective.

The GAO study entitled "Faith-Based and Community Initiative: Improvements in Monitoring Grantees and Measuring Performance Could Enhance Accountability" found that "While officials in all 26 FBOs [faith-based organizations receiving federal grants] that we visited said that they understood that federal funds cannot be used for inherently religious activities, a few FBOs described activities that appeared to violate this safeguard. Four of the 13 FBOs that provided voluntary religious activities did not separate in time or location some religious activities from federally funded program services."

The report also noted that "[L]ittle information is available to assess progress toward another long-term goal of improving participant outcomes because outcome-based evaluations for many pilot programs have not begun."

Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who along with Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., requested the report, said "The Bush administration has failed to develop standards to verify that faith-based organizations aren't using federal funds to pay for inherently religious activity or to provide services on the basis of religion."