President Biden Restores White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships
This morning, President Biden announced that he would restore The White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
You can read the White House fact sheet here. The Office will be led by Melissa Rogers, who is returning to The White House from a similar post in the second-term of the Obama Administration. Josh Dickson, who you’ll remember as the person who led faith outreach on the Biden campaign, will serve as Deputy Director. Trey Baker, who led African-American outreach on the Biden campaign, will have a role in the Office as well. EJ Dionne’s op-ed is a good indication of how Melissa envisions the Office, given her long history of work with EJ on these issues including a recent report on faith and the federal government, which, along with her book, will certainly gain more readers in the coming days.
A few notes of reaction:
The faith-based office has always been a bit unwieldy: from a bureaucratic perspective, the office has been empowered in ways that are not helpful and disempowered in ways that are not helpful. Melissa will have a new title, in addition to Executive Director, which now includes a specific, explicit mandate around public policy—Senior Director for Faith and Public Policy. This reflects a significant level of awareness from The White House that it is important to have someone in a role with a mandate for ensuring their policymaking process is informed by an awareness of how faith intersects with public policy. That’s promising! It’s also promising that there seems to be an attempt to gain clarity around how the Office interacts with the Office of Public Engagement, which has been murky in the past. It remains to be seen whether the tweaks made to the structure of the Office will be sufficient, or if they might bring up new problems, but I view their approach to this work as attentive to the demands of the moment.
I recommended Melissa Rogers to succeed the faith initiative’s first Executive Director in the Obama Administration, and I think she’s a wise choice to lead the effort in this Administration as well. Even wiser, it seems as if she enters the role with a level of staff support that she lacked when she came in eight years ago. The Office will benefit from being led by someone who is not primarily known as a partisan actor.
And Melissa will benefit from her public policy role, which will only be further empowered by how robust the Domestic Policy Council looks to be under Amb. Susan Rice.
The announcement of the Office specifically highlights the positive role faith communities can play in our national response to COVID, which I highlighted last week.
The Trump Administration not only undermined the faith-based initiative in The White House, but proactively harmed how government relates to faith generally. In addition to the pandemic, and the other crises President Biden has highlighted, the Office will also have to work to repair the damage that has been done to specific faith communities across the country as well as the role of faith in our politics.
On the other hand, the Biden Administration’s approach to faith cannot become merely reactive, falling into the the trap of just trading out which narrow segment has power and access, rather than finding ways to partner across the theological and religious spectrum. There are major challenges and opportunities on the horizon which will require careful navigation. I’m more hopeful the Biden-Harris Administration has key people and structure in place to navigate those challenges and opportunities wisely because of this announcement.
In the coming weeks and months, this newsletter will provide insight and analysis on how the Office’s work develops. Let us know what questions you have, and what issues you’re most interested in, as we develop our approach to covering these and other key developments.
Michael
P.S. Support the work of this newsletter by joining our community of political, religious, media and civic leaders, and become a paid subscriber.
I’ll be especially curious to see how faith leaders respond to overtures from this office. Hoping for better.
Was returning to this work ever something you were interested in Michael?