Bush’s Faith-Based Project Chief Quits After 6 Months

The director of President Bush’s program to expand religious groups’ role in providing social services said Friday that he will resign, the latest setback to an initiative that has been beleaguered from its start.

The resignation of John J. DiIulio Jr. as director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, while not entirely unexpected, nonetheless surprised many observers. Some feared the White House was losing a key ambassador to a broad range of religious communities, including many that do not fall within the traditional Republican fold.

“We appreciate . . . John’s efforts to reach out to the array of faiths,” said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

DiIulio’s resignation “marks a crossroads for the president,” added Saperstein. He urged Bush to find a successor who will continue DiIulio’s efforts to forge a broad consensus around the initiative, which his group opposes.

For more than six rocky months, DiIulio advocated Bush’s faith-based plan in Congress and the broader religious community, gaining credibility as an official who understood the nitty-gritty details of government and the travails of life on urban streets.

But DiIulio, a Democrat, devout Roman Catholic and respected academic, was not able to defuse fierce political opposition to the program, which is at the center of the administration’s domestic agenda.

Last month, the House approved a bill that would make it easier for faith-based groups to qualify for federal funds. But the legislation faces a struggle in the Senate, where opponents are lining up against a provision that would exempt such organizations from state and local antidiscrimination laws.

At its heart, the program is intended to help overcome obstacles to letting religious-based and community organizations provide some of the social services traditionally offered by the government. Critics have warned that this could cross the constitutional line that separates church and state.

On Thursday, the White House released DiIulio’s six-month review of the red tape and other barriers faith-based groups face in trying to gain federal social-service contracts. Attending a Brookings Institution forum to unveil the report, “Unlevel Playing Field,” DiIulio gave no indication of his impending resignation or any displeasure with the administration’s progress on faith-based initiatives.

In interviews with news services Friday, DiIulio said it had always been his plan to leave the government after a brief stint. But he also expressed the frustrations of trying to shepherd a complex, untraditional issue through the political minefields of Washington:

“At one level, it’s all the things the American people find distasteful,” he said. “Things that should be bipartisan can turn partisan. Things that should bring people together divide them. The good news is that leadership ultimately trumps that.”

DiIulio becomes the first senior aide to leave the Bush White House. Another senior aide said Friday that DiIulio had not spoken with the president before he announced his resignation. When DiIulio wa appointed in January, the White House said he planned to stay no more than six months.

“John DiIulio was given a very difficult and complicated challenge in shaping and moving the president’s faith-based plan,” said Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) in a statement Friday. Lieberman, a leading supporter of faith-based approaches to addressing social problems, said DiIulio “leaves having done a remarkable job in advancing this critically important cause in a short time.”

But not all remarks were so kind.

“I can’t blame him for leaving,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a leading opponent of the initiative. “I wish he’d take the faith-based initiative with him.”

DiIulio’s departure “is bound to hurt the initiative,” said John Green, a University of Akron expert on religious-based voting patterns and a friend of DiIulio. But, he added, “it may be the time has come that someone with more Washington experience” is needed.

The faith-based proposal was a cornerstone of the “compassionate conservatism” theme of Bush’s presidential campaign. The effort to win its approval in the Democratic-led Senate now “needs the president’s attention and time,” one Bush advisor said.

DiIulio arrived with much fanfare. But he lacked necessary political ease and skills. He leaves with considerable frustration over the inability to quickly meld the work of government and private charities, and convinced that religious groups interested in providing social services are treated with suspicion and bias by the government.

Marvin Olasky, an architect of Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” said that DiIulio was “initially helpful” to the faith-based cause. But Olasky maintained that DiIulio’s push to make religious groups eligible for federal grants greatly complicated the issue. Limits on worship, religious teaching and proselytization by groups receiving federal grants were needed to pass the House bill, but such restrictions have drained the enthusiasm from many who initially supported the faith-based initiative, including many Christian evangelicals, he said.

“I think we’ve learned that the direct grant approach isn’t going to work,” said Olasky, who would prefer other approaches, such as vouchers that would allow people to select a faith-based group for a social service.

DiIulio, 43, plans to return to Philadelphia, where he is on leave from the University of Pennsylvania. He said he will leave the White House as soon as an orderly transition can be arranged.

White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said Friday that, in searching for a replacement, Bush would seek someone familiar with the work of the grass-roots organizations that would benefit from the initiative.

Fleischer said “the president will miss John DiIulio. John DiIulio has done a wonderful job launching the initiative.”

DiIulio’s departure comes even as the administration continues to work to find initial candidates for mid-level political positions--the sort that support Cabinet officials and provide the spadework for pushing a new administration’s political and policy agenda.

Another scholar familiar with DiIulio’s work and the interaction between the White House and Congress, Ross K. Baker of Rutgers University, said DiIulio had “the second-hardest selling job in the administration,” tougher than all but Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill’s mission to gain a role for private investment in the Social Security program.

Replacing him will be difficult, Baker said, because administrations embarking on controversial programs routinely “lead with the strongest person” to win congressional approval.

But, he said, the subject has great appeal within the academic community and, indeed, has been one of fascination since French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville studied the middle ground between government and volunteer society that he found unique in America in the early 19th century.

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Gerstenzang reported from Crawford and Peterson from Washington. Times staff writer Anuj Gupta contributed to this story.