Bill Berkowitz*

OAKLAND, California, Aug 25 2006 (IPS) — The appointment of Jay Hein, a relatively unknown right-wing think tanker, to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives may be a sign that the George W. Bush administration has just about thrown in the towel on promoting what was supposed to be – when announced in January 2001 – the centrepiece of the president’s domestic policy initiatives.

Unlike the high-profile appointments of John DiIulio, an independent-minded academic who first headed up the faith-based office and who resigned after being undercut by movement conservatives, and his successor Jim Towey, the announcement of Hein’s appointment came on a Friday afternoon, the news cycle’s traditional dead time.

And it followed on the heels of a critical report from the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress, which found, among other things, that too many religious groups that won government grants under the programme 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.

“There are two big issues facing the faith-based initiative these days,” both of which do not look good for the future of the programme, Rob Boston, the assistant director of communications for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a non-sectarian, non-partisan organisation, told IPS.

“Number one, to what extent religious-based discrimination will be tolerated in a taxpayer funded programme. And two, the question of effectiveness and results,” he said.

“From the very beginning, it appears that the faith-based initiative was at least in part designed with political goals: keep the religious right happy and, as a side, yet significant, benefit, bring a host of Latino and African American organisations to the Republican Party,” Boston noted.

Bush’s faith-based initiative is primarily aimed at reducing the size – but not the spending – of government by shifting the responsibility for delivering a host of services from governmental agencies to religious groups.

A central point the administration has argued from the outset is that faith-based organisations had been discriminated against historically, and it was going to do all in its power to level the playing field, giving religious groups the opportunity to apply for and receive government grants, which have since added up to hundreds of millions of dollars.

As the new head of the faith-based office, Hein brings more than a decade’s worth of conservative advocacy and activism to his position. He served as a welfare reform policy assistant under Wisconsin’s former Gov. Tommy Thompson; worked several years for the conservative Hudson Institute as its executive director of Civil Society Programmes, where he oversaw a number of the think tank’s major research centres; and in 2004, he founded the Indianapolis, Indiana-based Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.

One of Hein’s strong suits is his ability to negotiate the world of public relations, Sheila Suess Kennedy, an associate professor of Law and Public Policy at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, told IPS in an email exchange.

“Hein is very smooth, very bright and he certainly comes across better than Jim Towey,” she noted.

“Where Towey appeared to come across as an none-too-bright ideologue too stubborn even to listen to the concerns of those who disagreed with him, Hein appears courteous and willing to listen, and seems possessed of a far more sophisticated intellect,” said Kennedy, the author of the forthcoming book, “Charitable Choice at Work: Evaluating Faith-based Job Programs in the States (Public Management and Change).”

The Sagamore Institute, which has an impressive and deeply conservative board of trustees, maintains that its mission is to “provide independent and innovative research to a world in progress.”

Boston said that neither Hein nor the Sagamore Institute had been on the “radar screen” of Americans United, but that he had “visited the organisation’s website, and it pretty much looks like a garden-variety conservative think tank. What struck me was how little the site actually says about the group. It’s only so much boilerplate.”

In an interview with the Indianapolis Star, Hein said, “The White House’s comment to me was that they have two and a half years left, and that is the equivalent of the entire (John F.) Kennedy presidency,” Hein said. “They feel that is a healthy amount of time to accomplish unfinished business that they deem a high priority.”

Boston maintained that it would be counterintuitive for the administration to hire someone whose so-called unfinished business will be to question the programme’s efficacy.

“I expect that Hein will be more in the mold of Jim Towey, that he will take a partisan approach and act as an administration mouthpiece, rather than follow in the footsteps of the more research-oriented John DiIulio. There is no reason at this stage that the administration wants someone in that office who will bring a discerning scientific approach to the table.”

At the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, Hein – who was also appointed as deputy assistant to the president and will advise him on such domestic policies as immigration or responses to emergencies such as Hurricane Katrina – will likely concern himself with playing patch-up, mending some of the huge holes exposed by the GAO report.

And the president’s faith-based initiative? While it hasn’t been institutionalised or given the full congressional stamp of approval, the initiative has nevertheless spread its tentacles to more than a dozen administration offices and several dozen states, and given out several billion dollars to religious organisations.

“Despite experiencing legislative gridlock, it has certainly become a permanent part of the political landscape,” Boston noted.

“Since Bush was unable to get a comprehensive faith-based bill through congress – despite the best efforts of Bush point men, Sen, Rick Santorum (a Pennsylvania Republican) and Sen. Joe Lieberman (a Connecticut Democrat) – the president brought the initiative into play through a series of executive orders and regulatory changes within certain cabinet level departments. Those orders have become the perpetual motion machines that future administrations may not even think to shut down.”

*Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His WorkingForChange column “Conservative Watch” documents the strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the U.S. Right.