Carroll Commencement
Fairborn commencement
Badin graduation
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > February > 09
Monday, February 9, 2009
Editorial: Faith-based groups must help Obama
In the 1990s, faith-based community groups were deeply involved in government-funded programs that, for example, helped drug addicts or offenders leaving prisons or tried to rehabilitate stricken neighborhoods. Dayton organizations were among those getting federal money.
When George W. Bush became president, one of his first acts was to call for making federal money more accessible to faith-based groups. His legislative proposal died in the face of much opposition from Democrats. The hottest fight was about whether the groups should be allowed to take religion into account in hiring people. The White House said yes. Most Democrats said no.
Rep. Tony Hall, D-Dayton, was an exception. He had long been an unusual Democrat when it came to religion. His deep faith pushed him to conservative positions on abortion and gay rights. But it also pushed him to be passionate about helping the poor in this country and abroad. He wanted government to be involved and to bring religious organizations into the effort as much as possible.
When President Bush failed to get his proposal through Congress, he issued an executive order that achieved some of his goals. He created a White House office of faith-based programs and fostered a network of offices around the country.
Since then, some writers and thinkers have pushed the Democrats to increase their attention to religiously motivated voters, saying the Democrats were forfeiting votes pointlessly. In 2008, Barack Obama accepted the advice. He thought he could win the votes of members of conservative churches who were not focused exclusively on abortion and gay rights.
He said he favored government funding of faith-based groups. However, in a speech in Ohio, he said such groups shouldn’t “proselytize” with federal money or “discriminate” on the basis of religion in employment. He bought into the notion that such behavior violates the constitutional ban on the government establishing religion.
Now President Obama has created his own White House office of faith-based programs. He’s added neighborhood-based programs to its agenda, and he’s created a large advisory board, including some people from conservative religious groups that make some Democrats nervous. His director is a fellow who worked on religious issues during his campaign, Joshua DuBois, 26.
But the president has not issued a ban on proselytizing and employment discrimination. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union have treated this as a breach of faith. But the White House says it will deal with charges of proselytizing and discrimination on a case-by-case basis. The hope, clearly, is to find some common ground in practice, even if that’s difficult in the abstract.
As of now, the president can’t reasonably be accused of breaking his promise. He’s relying on his board and staff to remember his promise and to keep him out of the trouble with the hard-liners on separation of church and state.
He’s apparently also relying on faith-based groups to structure their proposals in ways that don’t raise alarms.
It’s worth a try.
The country needs a search for common ground in the effort to involve as many organizations as possible in attacking social problems. It does not need a constitutional showdown.
In the midst of a hyper-partisan showdown about his economic stimulus, President Obama is trying to give life to his insistence that the two parties can find much to cooperate on. He’s going to need skill, luck and help to make faith-based spending an example.
Permalink | Comments (1) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, National politics, Religion and Faith
The Catholic Church brings back indulgences?
I had to read this New York Times story to actually believe the headline. Indulgences, the corrupting currency of official forgiveness that helped enrage Martin Luther into launching the protestant movement, are officially back.
Thankfully, you can’t buy them anymore. Now you can “earn” the equivalent of credit for good behavior on a future purgatory sentence in this life by racking up prayers and charitable contributions after confession.
As a Catholic, it is bizarre to me that the church would reach back in time to revive this outdated concept. It’s a tilt back in the direction of what you might call “checklist Catholicism.” Mark enough checks on your score card (rosary prayers, Mass attendance, etc.) and hope you earn enough “points” to get into heaven.
Personally, I’d like to see the church focus more on its better traditions that reinforce the value of living a good life and serving others in ways that make the world a better place.
What do you make of the revival of “indulgences?” Let us know in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Religion and Faith, Scott Elliott
Editorial: Gates’ complaints reach Wright-Patt
Because hundreds of new jobs are coming to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, local discussion about the base’s future has been mostly upbeat.
But all is not rosy. As Secretary of Defense Robert Gates noted in congressional testimony that is excerpted below, military spending is entering a new era.
The Pentagon’s inflation-adjusted budget has grown by more than 80 percent in eight years. Not all of that has been spent in Iraq. It’s been a good time for Defense Department contractors. Last year, the inspector general of the Pentagon said defense acquisitions had been growing so fast that his auditors couldn’t keep up.
Going forward, Secretary Gates only hopes that the Pentagon’s budget will keep up with inflation. Even that isn’t guaranteed. The country tends to turn away from military spending after a war. And the economy is pushing policymakers in that direction.
Some people have argued for more military spending as a part of the pending stimulus plan. But they haven’t gotten far. The president has long seen the winding down of the Iraq war as a chance to make major savings in defense spending. And he thinks domestic needs have gone unmet.
Moreover, there’s debate about how useful military spending is in spurring the economy. (It doesn’t seem to have done much lately.) And there’s doubt about the wisdom of funding more military programs when the Pentagon already faces criticism about its handling of existing projects.
Those problems are the gist of the secretary’s comments about acquisitions. The department will be answering a lot of questions from Gates, long a tough taskmaster, even before Congress pipes up with its own.
Gates notes problems with several Air Force programs that Wright-Patt has had a role in managing: the tanker for refueling planes in midair, which has been fought over for years; the CSAR-X search-and-rescue helicopter; and the Joint Strike Fighter,
The Pentagon is not alone in coming in for scrutiny for its acquisitions record. There’s also the Department of Homeland Security, among others, as a result of a general explosion in the number of government contracts in this decade.
And it’s certainly not only the Democrats and Secretary Gates who are focused on the issue. An unnamed adviser of Sen. John McCain is quoted by the Washington Times as saying the senator “feels very strongly that the whole procurement process is totally dysfunctional. … He believes that putting order, discipline and accountability back in the process will stop the gold-plating and bring costs down.”
Some problems are inevitable. The Pentagon and Congress keep changing signals as to how many copies they want of a given system and its exact specs. That inevitably leads to cost overruns, which then get blamed on people running the program.
And, as Secretary Gates notes, a big problem now is that the acquisitions field is understaffed, with a whopping 43 percent vacancy in key spots.
(Wright-Patt said last fall that it was seeking 220 financial and contract-management people. Said John Day, of the Aeronautical Systems Center, “Over several years of work-force reduction, mainly through hiring restrictions, ASC got a bit out of balance.”)
Who is to blame for the national personnel shortage is debated. The Clinton administration tried to eliminate “bureaucrats” in its “reinvention of government.” But the explosion in contracts in this decade has produced new personnel needs, but not new personnel.
What’s clear is that the purchasing process needs help from Washington as much as oversight.
Wright-Patterson and the military are entering a new era under a secretary who knows what he must do to keep Congress from changing directions too sharply on spending.
Defense chief wants big change on acquistions front
In Senate testimony at the end of January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made comments about military acquisitions, an activity central to the role of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The comments are excerpted and slightly rearranged here to minimize the use of words not familiar to nonspecialists.
Secretary Gates said:
Chief among institutional challenges facing the department is acquisitions — broadly speaking, how we acquire goods and services and manage the taxpayers’ money. The Congress (has) rightly been focused on this issue for some time. The economic crisis makes the problem even more acute.
Allow me to share a few general thoughts.
There are a host of issues that have led us to where we are, starting with long-standing systemic problems:
• Entrenched attitudes throughout the government are particularly pronounced in the area of acquisition: a risk-averse culture, a litigious process, parochial interests, excessive and changing requirements, budget churn and instability, and sometimes adversarial relationships within the Department of Defense and between DoD and other parts of the government.
• At the same time, acquisition priorities have changed from defense secretary to defense secretary, administration to administration, and Congress to Congress — making any sort of long-term procurement strategy on which we can accurately base costs next to impossible.
• Add to all of this the difficulty in bringing in qualified senior acquisition officials. Over the past eight years, for example, the Department of Defense has operated with an average percentage of vacancies in the key acquisition positions ranging from 13 percent in the Army to 43 percent in the Air Force.
Thus the situation we face today, where a small set of expensive weapons programs has had repeated — and unacceptable — problems with requirements, schedule, cost and performance.
While the number of overturned procurements as a result of protests remains low in absolute numbers — 13 out of more than 3.5 million contract actions in FY 2008 — highly publicized issues persist in a few of the largest programs.
The same is true of cost overruns, where five programs account for more than half of total cost growth. The list of big-ticket weapons systems that have experienced contract or program performance problems spans the services: the Air Force tanker, CSAR-X (combat search and rescue helicopter), VH-71 (Marine helicopter), Osprey, Future Combat Systems, Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter, Littoral Combat Ship, Joint Strike Fighter, and so on.
Since the end of World War II, there have been nearly 130 studies on these problems — to little avail. I mention all this because I do not believe there is a silver bullet, and I do not think the system can be reformed in a short period of time — especially since the kinds of problems we face date all the way back to our first secretary of war, whose navy took three times longer to build than was originally planned, at more than double the cost.
That said, I do believe we can make headway, and I have already begun addressing these issues:
• First, I believe that the FY 2010 budget must make hard choices. Any necessary changes should avoid across-the-board adjustments, which inefficiently extend all programs.
• We have begun to purchase systems at more efficient rates for the production lines.
• I will pursue greater quantities of systems that represent the “75 percent” solution instead of smaller quantities of “99 percent,” exquisite systems. (Our procurement and preparation must be driven more by the actual capabilities of potential adversaries, and less by what is technologically feasible given unlimited time and resources.)
• While the military’s operations have become very joint — and impressively so — budget and procurement decisions remain overwhelmingly service-centric. To address a given risk, we may have to invest more in the future-oriented program of one service and less in that of another service — particularly when both programs were conceived with the same threat in mind.
• I believe the Department should seek increased competition.
• Finally, we must restore the Department’s acquisition team.
Efforts to put the bureaucracy on a war footing have, in my view, revealed underlying flaws in the institutional priorities, cultural preferences, and reward structures of America’s defense establishment — a set of institutions largely arranged to plan for future wars, to prepare for a short war, but not to wage a protracted war.
The spigot of defense funding opened by 9/11 is closing. With two major campaigns ongoing, the economic crisis and resulting budget pressures will force hard choices on this department.
The president and I need your help as all of us together do what is best for America as a whole.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Wright Patterson Air Force Base
