J. David Kuo, onetime leader of Bush’s faith-based initiative, dies at 44
By Karen Tumulty, Saturday, April 6, 9:34 AM
J. David Kuo, an evangelical Christian conservative and former top official of President George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative who drew wide attention when he publicly accused the administration of failing to live up to the values it espoused, died April 5 in Charlotte. He was 44.
He was diagnosed a decade ago with brain cancer, his wife, Kimberly, said.
The arc of Mr. Kuo’s life and career had taken him from liberal to conservative, from hard-edged Republican activism in the 1990s to disillusionment with the idea that politics could serve as an extension of his faith.
After leaving his post as deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in 2003, Mr. Kuo became an open critic of that operation. He faulted the administration for failing to supply with office with anywhere near the $8 billion in federal spending that Bush, as a candidate, said would finance “armies of compassion.”
Mr. Kuo’s criticism echoed that of the first director of the office, John J. DiIulio Jr., who had resigned in August 2001, only seven months after it was formed.
A comprehensive 2009 report on the faith-based office conducted by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government at the State University of New York noted that the office helped change “the ‘culture of resistance’ that had existed in the federal government toward faith-based organizations’ participation in social service contracts.” But the report concurred with Mr. Kuo that ohundreds of millions of dollars was spent, far less than promised.
The faith-based office, which Bush created with his first executive order as president, had been a controversial initiative. It allowed overtly religious groups to receive federal funding for providing social services; critics said it blurred the line between church and state.
Mr. Kuo claimed the Bush White House lacked a genuine commitment to Bush’s presidential campaign promise of “compassionate conservatism.” Bush reaped political benefits from a softer image and a mobilized base of evangelicals through the faith-based initiative, but Mr. Kuo said the White House failed to help religious organizations receive the taxpayer money they needed to serve “the least, the last and the lost.”
Mr. Kuo also wrote a memoir of his political and personal evolution, published in 2006 and titled “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.” His criticism provoked the White House to respond via a spokesman that the faith-based office was a “top priority” for the president.
In a “60 Minutes” interview, Mr. Kuo added that the problem, as he saw it, was much larger than the White House and the faith-based initiative. As he wandered around a conservative gathering hall, he saw display booths for all types of social issues but none concerning poverty.
“You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell,” Mr. Kuo remarked. “Not a mention of the poor.”
