9
block grants that cross policy boundaries, and the politics of specific programs land some
in seemingly odd departments (for example, community empowerment grants in the
Department of Energy). This complication does not pose an insurmountable obstacle, but
those who wish to compare work FBO participation in various policy areas will need to
address it. We did not address this issue for this paper, because two other obstacles, the
absence of any federal system to keep track of FBO participation and the complexities of
federalism, did prove insurmountable (at least for now).
In its report Unlevel Playing Field (2001), the White House Office of Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives acknowledged these two obstacles noting the absence of any
way of identifying FBO organizations in grant applications and the high proportion of
formula grants given by federal agencies. Formula or block grants are money that is
given to state governments, who then decide how it is allocated toward social programs.
Nonetheless, some data on direct federal grants found in 2001 that most agencies
awarded very few funds to faith-based organizations. For example, the Office of Justice
Programs at the DOJ awarded less than one percent of total discretionary grant funds to
FBOs, while about 2 percent of grants from the Department of Education were awarded
to FBOs (Unlevel Playing Field, 5). The Department of Labor’s Welfare to Work
program also awarded about 2 percent of its grants to faith-based programs (Ibid.)
However, the percentage of faith-based organizations receiving federal grants rose when
considering HUD’s Continuum of Care program, which fights homelessness (16 percent),
and HHS’s Adolescent Family Life programs (21 percent), which funds abstinence
education (Unlevel Playing Field, 6).
Convention