I had an item earlier on David Kuo, the former second-in-command at the White House Faith-Based Office, who appears to have some fascinating revelations about the Bush gang in his new book, “Tempting Faith,” including the fact that the White House enjoys treating the religious right as a bunch of, well, suckers.
But there’s another point that Kuo raised that warrants some follow-up.
The money that was appropriated and disbursed [through the White House faith-based initiative], however, often served a political agenda, Kuo claims.
“Many of the grant-winning organizations that rose to the top of the process were politically friendly to the administration,” he says.
More pointedly, Kuo quotes an unnamed member of the review panel charged with rating grant applications.
“But,” she said with a giggle, ‘When I saw one of those non-Christian groups in the set I was reviewing, I just stopped looking at them and gave them a zero … a lot of us did.'”
In other words, Bush administration officials intentionally manipulated the federal grant process so that only certain types of people — in this case, people who were of the “right” religious faith — could qualify for funding.
If this sounds kind of familiar to you, there’s a good reason.
It’s because the Bush administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development did the exact same thing, only in Secretary Alphonso Jackson’s case, officials didn’t discriminate on the basis of religion, they discriminated on the basis of political affiliation.
Not to put too fine a point on this, it’s illegal — indeed, it’s a felony — for federal officials to manipulate the grant process like this.
The Federal Acquisition Regulations explain, in no uncertain terms, “Government business shall be conducted in a manner above reproach and, except as authorized by statute or regulation, with complete impartiality and with preferential treatment for none. Transactions relating to the expenditure of public funds require the highest degree of public trust and an impeccable standard of conduct.” Bush’s Faith-Based Office, like Bush’s HUD, ignored this and gave preferential treatment to those they liked best. We know this because Bush administration officials have said so publicly.
Indeed, the Competition in Contracting Act lists six circumstances in which a potential government contractor can be excluded from the grant process. Surprise, surprise, “not a conservative Christian Republican” isn’t on the list.
I wonder, if there was an investigation into the administration’s grant processes in all of the various cabinet agencies, exactly how much illegal discrimination do you think we’d find?