EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was updated to reflect the announcement of the Executive Order establishing the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.

By Stanley Carlson-Thies

An Executive Order from President Trump in early April regarding welfare and dependency, along with other Administration announcements and proposals from congressional Republicans, has prompted much concern. The Washington Post writes that these proposals “…amount to a comprehensive effort by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress to restrict access to the safety net and reduce the levels of assistance for those who do qualify.” In fact, these proposals do require close scrutiny. And yet Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, a former Obama administration White House official, calls the Executive Order a “promising plan.” Sunstein says because the plan connects the unemployed with job opportunities in order to help them move from social detachment to social engagement. In this way, the Executive Order has a promising thread which should not be overlooked.

In the Executive Order, entitled “Reducing Poverty in America by Promoting Opportunity and Economic Mobility,” the President advocates strengthening work requirements as a condition of receiving social benefits, the reduction of government bureaucracy, focusing benefits more closely on the most needy, cutting wasteful spending, and so on. And, notably, The President also calls for a redesign of federal policies to incorporate more bottom-up solutions generated by local private-sector organizations, including faith-based groups.

The Executive Order states:

“[Federal] policies should allow local entities to develop and implement programs and strategies that are best for their respective communities. Specifically, policies should allow the private sector, including community and faith-based organizations, to create solutions that alleviate the need for welfare assistance, promote personal responsibility, and reduce reliance on government intervention and resources.”

It is a promising strategy for government to more deeply engage with the private sector so that community organizations can help design alternative approaches, and not just partner with government to deliver programs that the government has designed. The extent and specific characteristics of poverty and marginalization differ area by area, as do the resources, so it is vital to adapt to local conditions.

Additionally, persistent poverty and disengagement from employment are not merely economic problems, they are social problems as well, and require the involvement of neighbors, trusted community institutions, and businesses committed to neighborhood success. The Executive Order notes that “strong social networks” are important for people to “sustainably” escape poverty. To fully engage these vital social networks and the particular resources they provide, they have to be part of the planning.

However, it is more than a little challenging for the government to utilize a bottom-up approach in designing programs by deeply engaging faith-based organizations, community groups, and local companies. Government is often better at commanding than listening. Congress typically specifies in great detail who can be served, how they can be served, and by which agency. Allowing significant local variation risks undermining equal access to assistance. Still, for over twenty years— starting with the Charitable Choice provision in the 1996 welfare reform law — Congress, and both Democratic and Republican administrations have been working toward more extensive partnerships with local faith-based and non-religious organizations in order to improve the effectiveness of federal efforts to redress poverty and other social problems.

That reform drive — the federal faith-based initiative — has made substantial progress, as reports on Charitable Choice and from the Bush administration and Obama administration show. Yet significantly transforming federal services to engage local community and faith organizations remains a big challenge. Last year, the Institutional Religious Freedom Alliance asked African American church leaders from the metropolitan Washington, DC area about the difficulties they encounter when seeking to partner with the federal Department of Health and Human Services to expand assistance to their communities. The first barrier the leaders named was precisely that programs are designed before local leaders and organizations have a chance to offer their fine-grained insight into local needs and resources. That is, the faith-based initiative has made some progress in opening up the competition for federal funds to a wider range of groups; however, it has not made as much progress in enabling solutions to be more responsive to local needs and local solutions, such as urban congregations with inadequately funded but expansive arrays of particularized services.

How will the Trump Administration strengthen and develop the federal faith-based initiative so that it can support bottom-up policymaking and localized service design and delivery? One (anonymous) close observer of the faith-based initiative over the past twenty years recently put it this way: George W. Bush came into the presidency with a well-developed philosophy of engaging what he called “the armies of compassion.” Similarly, when Barack Obama came to the White House, he brought with him a strong understanding — based on his own experience — of the vital role played by faith-based organizations in responding to social needs. During his campaign, President Donald Trump stressed business involvement, pushed for efficiency and for more-effective programs, and advocated for protecting religious freedom — but he did not arrive with an obvious strategy to engage faith-based and community-based organizations.

On May 3^rd, President Trump signed an executive order creating his version of the federal faith and community partnership initiative, proposing some new ways that the White House and the executive branch can learn from and connect with local and faith-based organizations. Even before this, the Trump administration has been slowly appointing new leaders to the Centers for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships that exist in the major federal departments that operate social service, education, and health programs. The White House’s Domestic Policy Council includes staff whose work on housing, anti-poverty, criminal justice, and other policies explicitly seeks to better engage local private sector organizations. President Trump’s Executive Order on poverty, opportunity, and economic mobility seeks to emphasize private-sector and civil-society partnerships. Unexpectedly, as the Trump administration focused on welfare reform, it had already begun elevating the role of faith-based and community-based organizations just as Congress and President Bill Clinton did when welfare reform was the major Washington DC preoccupation in the mid-1990s.