On August 2, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo to federal departments and agencies directing that they must assess their grant, contract, and other policies and practices to ensure compliance with President Obama’s Nov. 2012 Executive Order 13559, “Fundamental Principles and Policymaking Criteria for Partnerships with Faith-based and Other Neighborhood Organizations.” This Executive Order modifies, but only in a relatively minor way, the Charitable Choice and Equal Treatment principles developed during the Bush and Clinton administrations. It should be said that, compared to the Bush approach, the Obama approach stresses more the restrictions on faith-based services that are government funded–although acknowledging their legitimate freedoms.

President Obama’s Executive Order created an Interagency Working Group to develop guidance on how federal departments and agencies are to implement its principles. That guidance was issued more than a year ago, but was then, apparently, ignored by those departments and agencies. Melissa Rogers, when she took over as executive director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, stressed that one of her goals was to work with OMB to ensure that the guidance would result in department and agency action.

The Working Group report rightly stresses the importance of training government officials on the principles that are supposed to guide their interactions with faith-based organizations, and it also stresses that pertinent regulations and policy documents ought to be posted online so that everyone knows the rules that apply to government partnerships with faith-based and secular private organizations.

But in the absence of a determined push from OMB and the White House faith-based office, neither of these took place, contributing to a back-sliding in federal practice: the formal rules continue to provide for a level playing field, but the actual practices of government have tended to return to old habits that were less open to participation by explicitly faith-based service providers.

Given that the principles of the Executive Order and the guidance of the Working Group are very–if imperfectly–hospitable to faith-based involvement, it is all to the good that those principles be will be implemented and publicized.

See Melissa Rogers’ statement about the OMB memo here.

See IRFA’s commentary on the Working Group’s guidelines here.