Titled Faith-Based and Community Initiative: Improvements in Monitoring Grantees and Measuring Performance Could Enhance Accountability, the full report has just been posted on the GAO's website. Here is part of the Report Abstract:
Since 2001, federal agencies have awarded over $500 million through new grant programs to provide training and technical assistance to faith-based and community organizations and to increase the participation of these organizations in providing federally funded social services.... Most of the agencies provided grantees with an explicit statement on the safeguard prohibiting the use of direct federal funds for inherently religious activities. If these activities are offered, they must be offered separately in time or location from services provided with direct federal funds and must be voluntary for the beneficiary. However, we found that Justice's regulation and guidance related to these activities is unclear for its correctional programs. We also found that only four programs provided a statement on the rights of program beneficiaries and only three provided information on permissible hiring by FBOs.
While officials in all 26 FBOs [Faith Based Organizations] that we visited said that they understood that federal funds cannot be used for inherently religious activities, a few FBOs described activities that appeared to violate this safeguard. Four of the 13 FBOs that provided voluntary religious activities did not separate in time or location some religious activities from federally funded program services....
[I]t is unclear whether the data reported on grants awarded to FBOs provide policymakers with a sound basis to assess the progress of agencies in meeting the initiative's long-term goal of greater participation of faith-based and community organizations. Moreover, little information is available to assess progress toward another long-term goal of improving participant outcomes because outcome-based evaluations for many pilot programs have not begun.
