Faith-Based Welfare Reform: A Constitutional Crises

The Smaller Government Agenda  

The present welfare reform movement is the historical offspring of a small government movement that began during the Ragan presidency.  Since then it has been a mainstream bipartisan theme.   “Reducing the size of government”, “lowering the costs of doing government business”, “eliminating bureaucratic layering”, “doing more with less”, and finally “reinventing government” have become the politically correct manner of speech.  After the cold war, reengineering of government programs and their associated bureaucracies, budgetary reductions, and reductions in military and civil service manning were economically legitimate causes to a degree.  Now, two decades later, small-government politics have snowballed into a state of overkill that is increasingly dangerous to the long run interests of the nation.  Few would argue that an overly large government is ever a good thing.  The larger and more complex the bureaucracy the greater the drain on tax dollars with likely diminishing value added.  On the other hand, unreliable and ineffective stewardship of vital functions and services is the certain cost of an overly lean bureaucracy.  The issue for every era is determining what the appropriate balance should be. 

  Over time, small government politics have dramatically altered the boundaries between government and private sector in all domains from national defense to who hauls your garbage. Whatever else has happened, the agenda across the board has been to reduce the government workforce to the bare minimum and farm its core products and services out to the private sector. Justification for disenfranchisement hinges on the popular assumption that government bureaucracy is always inherently costly and inefficient.  Therefore, as the rhetoric goes, much of the work typically assigned to government is accomplished more economically and efficiently with a competitive system of contractor agencies that supply the requisite manpower and management infrastructure.

  The problem is that bureaucracy is still bureaucracy regardless of whether it’s composed of a large but coherent civil service, or a workforce supplied by a plethora of private sector contractors.  The American taxpayer is stuck with the bill regardless of who does the work. All other things being equal, smaller government really doesn’t mean anything if the costs of sustainment aren’t reduced as well.  For each contract worker, the government must pay the contractor agency enough money to cover a competitive wage, employee benefit package, administrative expenses, and a satisfactory net profit for the firm's ownership.  Unlike a civil service bureaucracy, private sector contractors are inherently profit driven in spite of the public interests involved.  Considering all this, the assumption that private sector contracting always magically reduces costs or improves the quality of government funded products and services, is a highly conjectural if not a completely false.  Regardless of these dangers and limitations, Bill Clinton and Al Gore were notorious for disenfranchising the government infrastructure in favor of private sector interests.  Undoubtedly, there are instances in science, engineering, and technology where private sector involvement in government business is both legitimate and essential.  Still, that doesn’t make it the proper shoe in all or even most circumstances.  Nor does it mean that the private sector should hold the administrative hammer in any case.  Whatever the inherent limitations, the civil service is the backbone of our government infrastructure, providing a stable continuity of stewardship even as political fads and elected officials come and go.  Many government programs, both defense related and domestic, are essential to the long run interests of the nation even though the costs are substantial.  Moreover, there are domestic programs that are civilly or culturally sensitive.  They need to remain inside government to protect the nation against private sector monopolies and to insure the quality and impartiality of the services rendered. In spite of the political rhetoric to the contrary, the public welfare system is a notable case in point.  

  This brings the discussion back to the central question asked earlier in this commentary.  How did an agenda of private sector contracting get entangled with the PRWORA reform movement in the first place?  The brutally direct answer is smaller government politics in the service of private sector pork barreling (note).  In turn, the issue of “charitable choice” got involved because of an opportunistic agenda inside the social conservative establishment.  First, there was the claim that a welfare system exclusively administered by secular organizations would become a safe haven for secular humanism, the archrival of the theocratic right.  This notion was bogus because the contract secular workers would be required to perform their duties just as if they were civil servants, and thus no agency unique social engineering was legally admissible.  Moreover, just on the face of inherent tendencies, the potential for involvement in a social engineering agenda is several orders of magnitude greater with a religion-based organization.  In fact, it is most likely inevitable.  In spite of this glaring potentiality, the right wing argued that many established faith-based organizations had a sustained record in charity work.  And therefore they were just as properly suited and postured to take on the role of welfare administrators as any candidate non-religious agency.  That claim notwithstanding, the overriding issue was the huge pot of government dollars that was now up for grabs.  With money going to the private sector, the faith-based charity establishment wanted the lion’s share if not ultimately the whole enchilada.  With Pentecostal fundamentalist John Ashcroft leading the charge, the charitable choice clause was a masterstroke for the religious right.  It was the decisive foot in the door they now vigorously endeavor to exploit.  The theocratic power mongers have breached a very large hole in the walls separating government and religion (Ashcroft profile) (more Ashcroft).   

  Weaning Peter to Addicting Paul

At least in theory, for the charitable choice agenda to prevail, Congress and the American public must be convinced that a cumbersome mix of faith-based and secular organizations will cost less and be more effective in dealing with the problems of poverty and welfare dependence. Is there any tangible justification for such a conclusion?  Since the enactment of the TANF program, the number of people on welfare has steadily dropped overall.   However, this was not due to the intervention of private sector contractors or charitable choice alternatives.  Rather, it was the unambiguous result of the TANF mandated five-year limit on how long anyone could draw welfare.  This coupled with obligatory participation in job search, remedial education, and/or community service in return for a welfare check.  In due respect to the issues, the 1996 welfare reform act was motivated by the valid observation that the social theories underlying the previous AFDC system encouraged people to become chronically dependent on welfare for a living.  After the five-year time limits went into effect, many of the physically able recipients eventually left the system for what employment they could find.  So, in terms of getting people off the welfare role, the essential changes instituted by TANF have evidently served the goal for which they were intended (Reference).  Very notably, however, this success was achieved with the government bureaucracy still predominantly intact and with only limited participation from faith-based or other private sector organizations.  Further, there is no substantive evidence that the few participating private sector organizations were in any way superior in terms of accomplishing the TANF mandated goals.  The tangible underlying problem with the old AFDC system was not inefficiencies within the civil service system per se, but rather congressional legislation that forced the civil service system to operate on a bad welfare theory. 

Is TANF ultimately the correct solution or just a political indulgence initiated during a time of economic prosperity?  The jury is still out and will likely remain that way for quite some time.  For the moment, welfare reform presses but with increasing participation from the faith-based private sector.  Indeed, if TANF cannot be successful without private sector involvement, it is unlikely to be successful with private sector involvement.  Ultimately, the question boils down to what practical value there is in contracting welfare services out to the private sector?  Whatever the long run consequences of TANF, there is something curiously insensible about weaning the existing population of welfare recipients from dependence on government money only to allow religious charity organizations to become addicted.  It only serves to entangle the government and the private sector in a corrupt and constitutionally destructive relationship. 

Because of the reductions in the number of people drawing welfare, there have been some tangible cost savings with the new system.  Because of the agenda under both the former and present administrations, the resulting savings are unfortunately being neutralized in the service of entangling government with religious agendas in other ways (news article) (Vouchers).  There is therefore no reason to believe that the overall cost of government-funded welfare and related charity grants won’t continue to escalate.  A less costly and more efficient welfare system simply won’t be accomplished by replacing the existing government bureaucracy with a plethora of charity and social service organizations each having their own unique internal bureaucracies and business agendas.  The resulting super bureaucracy will ultimately be larger, more complex, expensive, and infinitely more difficult to audit and enforce regulatory standards.  Further, if bad politics hadn’t turned welfare reform into a candy-shop for the private sector in the first place, the whole issue of religious involvement and First Amendment violations would never have become a player. 

Unfortunately, the social and economic dangers haven’t done much to deter the advocates of “partnerships” between religion and government.  They appeal to intervening social problems like occupational indolence, drug addiction, divorce, teenage pregnancies, and so on to justify their cause.  In some way, all of these maladies are believed to be causally or incidentally linked to crime, unemployment, and inadequate childcare among the nation’s poor.  The classic notion is that the antecedents of poverty and joblessness stem from insufficient cultivation of the character traits underlying self-control, social responsibility, and honest hard work.  In addition, since it’s so often touted to be instrumental to such things, it seems completely reasonable to the hard-core faithful that religion should be steward to the new welfare system.  The proponents go on to assert that faith-based charity organizations are more likely to understand the problems of the people in the communities they serve.  The inevitable assertion is that they can reach and redeem many among the needy that a government agent or non-religious private sector alternative cannot.  Such claims often come attended with glowing reports about the miracles wrought by faith-based organizations and how inexpensive they were to achieve.

Although appealing to some, these augments suffer from severe shortfalls.  Religious charities have undoubtedly helped some people, but claims of success across the larger population tend not to hold up when closely examined.  In addition, there is the inherent problem of achieving fair representation among the various religious persuasions and denominations each having a stake in matters of faith and community outreach.  Neither religion in general nor any sectarian persuasion in particular has any exclusive claim to the keys of character building.  There are far too many people with alternative religious and philosophical orientations, who demonstrate the marks of economic and social success in life to ever suggest otherwise.  Not everyone’s circumstances and predilections are the same and thus no single moral or motivational shoe will ever fit all.  A given faith-based organization may be institutionally incapable of relating beneficially to the life circumstances or unique challenges facing a given welfare recipient and not possess the wisdom of insight to realize it.  At best, they can help some of the people some of the time, but they can’t come close to helping all of the people all of the time. 

By their very nature, faith-based organizations carry tangible biases regarding moral values and social engineering theory.  In virtually any instance, the specifics of their biases won’t enjoy universal acceptance.  They may be racially, religiously, or socially prejudiced and therefore potentially in conflict with the beliefs of either the welfare recipient, the pluralistic interests of the larger community, or both.  This creates problems for establishing equitable standards within the government’s selection process that defy transcendence.  Whatever the government’s selection criterion might turn out to be, it couldn’t possibly accommodate all private sector organizations having legitimate stakes in matters of faith and charity causes.  The hard truth is that any organization that is authorized government money and authority to dispense welfare entitlements enjoys a competitive edge over the organizations that are not so authorized.  In such case, the un-funded organizations face an undercutting of their ability to perform the useful work they can.  Forcing the welfare recipients under the tutelage of the funded organization may actually deter the recipients from connecting or sustaining relations with the kind of motivational support and guidance that best suits their circumstances.  In such case, the funded organizations end up enhancing their own influence at the expense of both the welfare recipient and the eclectic effectiveness of the larger religious and human service community.

Anyone who asserts that welfare recipients don’t have a “charitable choice” under a government run system, are really indulging in political sophistry.  When was it that any charity organization didn’t have the right to engage in community outreach and thus assist those who are interested and willing?  When was it that any welfare recipient didn’t have the right to solicit guidance and support from among the various churches and charity organizations?  If some non-profit organization is so sterling in what it provides, then the word will get around and both private sector donations and the needy will come knocking without needing government money and authority to leverage attention.  The truth is that government funding is advantageous in terms of achieving the kind of official status that funnels the welfare eligible to the organization’s door.  Although always touted to be in the name of righteous causes, the result may end up being beneficial only to the organization’s proprietors and not to the poor and underprivileged they allegedly serve.   

          Poverty’s Measure and Fundamentalist Causes

      Finally, the blunt truth is that poverty has been an inherent problem since the dawn of civilization and its complete eradication is a distant ideal at best.  Undoubtedly, there are a significant number of citizens in this country that are poor and under privileged.  Still, being poor and under privileged is something that must be reckoned against a tangible objective standard.  That is, there is a large difference between simply being poor or under privileged and being completely destitute.  For instance, the United States Census measures poverty against a threshold standard of yearly income relative to family size.  In comparison, it is unlikely that the standards used by most other nations are nearly so generous.   

When all is considered, the percentages of officially poor or destitute Americans versus the objective depth of their collective plight, comes nowhere near to matching the problems of poverty and outright starvation in so many other parts of the world.  Relative to global conditions, it would be grossly unfair to judge that our nation performs so badly in keeping poverty levels in check (some statistics).  Notably also, we have managed to do quite well without feeding the religious charities with tax dollars.  In fact, one of the salient reasons that so many people migrate to this country (either legally or illegally) is because of the rich and often exploitable system of welfare and social security entitlements that residency affords (example).  A private sector administered welfare system with diminished government oversight is bound to be even more amenable to exploitation.  In fact, the very process of implementing the TANF system has created a transitional condition of great national vulnerability.  Quite predictability, powerful right wing factions are vigorously endeavoring to exploit it.  With their ceaseless propaganda about cultural permissiveness and moral decay as justification, they do their deadly best to transform the public welfare system into a government-funded religious establishment. 

The fundamentalist's solution for saving society from itself hasn’t changed much in more than a thousand years.  Give them the seat of power and authority, they declare, fashion the laws in accordance with their doctrinal and moral mandates, and all of society’s ills will magically shrink away.  The trouble is that the history of their religion’s participation in the world does not justify the claim.  Their religion is not by any means beyond accountability where societal ills are concerned (Ten Commandments).  The nation’s collective efforts to keep poverty, illiteracy, and related problems in check will not benefit by an overemphasis on religion.  Take for example the dominant influence of Catholicism in Mexico for example.  The nature of the popular faith inherently discourages competitors, both civil and religious, thus implicitly if not consciously encouraging weak and corrupt government dominated by a counterpart rich and privileged upper class minority.  If strong secular systems of social welfare were to come into being, then the citizenry would not be so dependent on the church in times of need.  That kind of material and psychological dependency the church dearly endeavors to cultivate and sustain.  It is a known fact that religious participation and viable secular welfare systems are negatively correlated.

“…  on the degree of religious pluralism and governmental regulation faced by religious organizations, we argue and empirically demonstrate that state welfare spending has a detrimental, albeit unintended, effect on long-term religious participation and overall religiosity …….. The implication is that religious social mobilization and political involvement are more likely in countries with less extensive welfare systems and, conversely, that the expansion of state-sponsored social welfare will diminish, though not eliminate, the role that religion will play in politics.” (Gill and Lundsgaarde)

Although a sectarian coalition lurks behind the faith based welfare movement in the US, the same generic dynamic of church versus state power and authority is nevertheless in play.  The imposition of “charitable choice” and “faith based” social welfare are decisively insidious steps toward consuming the United States under an archaic theocratic design. The great strength, vitality, and promise of America is in its plurality and diversity, be it racial, ethnic, occupational, religious, philosophical, or in matters of personal lifestyle. These precious liberties are the very stuff that fundamentalist religion has always openly and even violently sought to discourage.  The precious freedom of differing points of view and choices about matters of religion and morality can only exist in a nation where separation between government and religion is effectively enforced. 

Conclusion

The bottom line is that the American taxpayer should not accept paying for a public welfare system that stands to be religiously monopolistic, socially discriminatory, increasingly costly, and constitutionally destructive.  Undoubtedly, it’s difficult to fashion and sustain a welfare system that is completely impartial in matters of race, ethnic background, religion, or lifestyle circumstances.  However, a civil service administered welfare system that is bound to enforced standards of neutrality, has at least a reasonable chance of approximating that ideal.  In contrast, a welfare system inherently biased by an evil mix of religiosity and profit motive can never possibly come close. The Sixth Article and First Amendment were explicitly intended to guarantee freedom of religion and therefore also protection from conscription to religion.  All citizens of this nation, regardless of their social or economic status, have the right to such entitlements without coercion or conscription by religion or any other factionist social ideology.  The “charitable choice” and “faith based” legislative agenda is indicative of a constitutionally anarchistic trend in American politics that threatens those basic civil rights.  The pragmatically and constitutionally valid answer is to scrap private sector involvement altogether and distance the core welfare programs from the politically charged issues of “faith-based” participation.  Any argument about the present legislative snowball being impossible to stop is an insidious illusion.  If we were able to repeal AFDC after all these years, then we can certainly turn back TANF from being corrupted by the private sector opportunism that the “charitable choice” loophole has fostered.  Allowing any faction the means to achieve stewardship over our public welfare system places the Constitution and the future of our basic civil entitlements in danger.  The only tangible solution is to repeal the charitable choice clause and thereby have done with the president Bush’s and now president Obama’s faith-based extrapolations altogether.

This nation’s government stands on a vital balance of power between the rule of law and the rule of democracy.   Both are required in a just and free society.  The juxtaposition of power is guardian against prejudicial mob rule, but also intends a government for all of the people, not just some of the people.  Among other things, the Constitution was crafted to protect minority rights against the tyranny of the majority.  For the same reason it is also intended to be guardian against injustices wrought by any powerful minority.  The religious right wing is such a minority.  They are the perpetrators of the faith-based movement which has gained sufficient public empowerment to steer national politics down a very dangerous path.  If our elected officials are collectively subtending the Constitution in the service of factional religious interests, then a vital balance of legal power has come undone.  The Bush administration was not the sole perpetrator of the faith-based agenda.  During 2000t presidential campaign, Al Gore drummed heavily on the charitable choice and faith-based welfare stump.  And it’s not to be forgotten that it was President Bill Clinton who signed the TANF legislation into law with the charitable choice clause attached.  With Joe Lieberman and company fueling the initiative in the aftermath, an influential bipartisan coalition was visibly operative. One that is indicative of a dangerous epidemic of factional corruption infecting our entire political system.  Consistent with this President Obama has let Bush’s biased faith-based executive orders stand virtually untouched.  This is in complete contradiction to the promises Obama made during his 2008 run for the Whitehouse.  Thus at present, it’s still business as usual for the charitable choice cronies.  

          END

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