A thought experiment where a federal agency replaces every church charity

Folks, I have to start with a confession: what follows is made up. It is a thought experiment, labelled satire, and nobody should read any sentence of the next several sections as a news report. There is no Department of Neighborliness. There is no ribbon, no ceremony and no form. I am inventing the whole thing so that we can take one idea, that government should handle what churches and neighbors handle now, and follow it one step further than its fans ever do.

Because every big idea in Washington is sold with a ribbon-cutting. So let us cut one.

The grand opening

Picture a Rose Garden ceremony, in this imaginary world, with a banner that says A KINDER, MORE EFFICIENT NEIGHBORHOOD. A cabinet secretary, brand new and beaming, announces the Department of Neighborliness. It will be, she says, a one-stop federal solution to the problem of too many people being helped by too many different volunteers in too many different basements.

The department's founding statute, the Comprehensive Casserole and Compassion Coordination Act, runs to four thousand pages and is passed, as such bills always are, before anyone has finished reading it. Its three missions are announced in order. First, nationalize the food pantry. Second, standardize the casserole. Third, centralize the hospital visit.

The speech is warm. The speech is long. The speech uses the word "stakeholders" nineteen times and the word "neighbor" once, in the title of the department. I say that with affection, because I know the real thing is coming: the part where it is explained to you that a program cannot love you, but it can process you.

The forms

Under the imaginary Act, here is what it takes, on opening day, to receive a casserole.

You begin at the web portal, which is down for scheduled maintenance. When it is back up, you create an account, which requires a login, which requires a verification code sent to a phone number you will lose before the code arrives. You then complete Form N-1, the Application for Neighborly Assistance, which asks for your household size, your income, your assets, and the date of your last meal. The date of your last meal is a required field. If you answer "this morning," the system flags you as "not currently food insecure" and routes you to a pamphlet.

You may qualify for a casserole under Category A (Bereavement), Category B (New Baby), Category C (Surgery, Elective) or Category D (Surgery, Non-Elective). Category D requires a letter from a physician. Category C requires a letter explaining why the surgery was elective. A casserole cannot be provided for a general sense of sadness, which falls under a different bureau.

The casserole itself is standardized. Federal regulations specify its contents: one protein, one starch, one vegetable, and one binding agent, which, to avoid the appearance of favoritism, shall not be cream of mushroom soup. A nutrition label is attached. The casserole is delivered in a sealed government container, at a time window between eight in the morning and six in the evening, which you must stay home for, with a signature required. A neighbor with a covered dish and a knock on the door, who would have been there in twenty minutes, is now a "non-credentialed provider" and must apply for a license. There is a waiting list for the license.

The waiting lists

Now we reach the part where the satire comes the closest to something real, so keep your seat.

My imaginary Department has a waiting list. It has a waiting list for the waiting list, called a pre-queue, which is an actual concept in actual bureaucracies, and one I mean sincerely. Eligibility for a hospital visit is determined by a point system. A visit is worth points for the severity of the illness, the distance from the visitor's home, and the length of time since the last visit. A person who is lonely but not seriously ill scores four points, and the cutoff is six.

The department is proud of its dashboards. They show, in cheerful colors, the number of visits "completed," a figure which counts a visit as complete when the visitor's badge has been scanned at the door. Nobody tracks whether the visitor stayed, listened or prayed. Nobody can, because prayer is outside the department's scope of services under the Establishment Clause, and listening is not a billable unit.

At the end of the first year the Secretary announces a success. More people than ever were "served." The number is large, because the department has redefined "served" to include anyone who received a pamphlet. A reporter asks about the people who did not receive casseroles. The Secretary says the program needs more funding.

What the real record tells us

Enough satire. The rest of this is real, and I mean to make it count. The Department of Neighborliness is imaginary, but its logic is not: it is the logic of every federal program that tries to replace a human relationship with a benefit, and the actual record of federal programs gives us a few things we can say with confidence.

The federal government has a long record of programs that start with a promise and end with a formula. The War on Poverty was launched in 1964, with the Economic Opportunity Act signed by Lyndon Johnson that August, and over the following decades Washington built a large structure of means-tested programs, each with its own eligibility rules and its own paperwork. I am not going to quote a poverty rate, because the figures depend on how poverty is measured, and the measurement is itself part of the argument. What I can say is that the programs created rules, and rules created gatekeepers, and gatekeepers created a system where a person must show a need in a form the program recognizes. A neighbor who sees a need does not need the form.

The federal government admits it cannot tell where all its money goes. Federal agencies are required to estimate and report "improper payments," meaning payments made in the wrong amount or to the wrong person, and the Government Accountability Office has reported on the problem repeatedly. I explain the mechanism in Washington Admits It Sends Billions to the Wrong People, by Law Every Year. A government that cannot reliably verify who receives its benefits is not obviously equipped to identify who needs a casserole.

The federal government writes rules by the thousands. By the count of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Federal Register published 3,248 final rules in 2024 and 2,441 in 2025. Each of those is a set of instructions that somebody must read and obey. Now imagine one of them governing the lasagna.

The federal government's own welfare reform of 1996 acknowledged what works. The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 included a "charitable choice" provision allowing religious organizations to compete for government contracts on the same terms as others without giving up their religious character. Whatever you think of that provision, it reflects a recognition, in a law Congress passed and President Clinton signed, that faith-based groups often reach people in ways agencies cannot.

Five numbered things a budget cannot supply

Here is the argument, in the debater's manner, since even a comedy bit should have a point.

One, a budget cannot know your name. A federal program serves a category: eligible household, qualifying income, covered condition. A congregation serves a person. The pastor knows the widow's husband died in March, that her son lives three states away, and that she will not ask. No eligibility screen contains that knowledge, and none can be written to.

Two, a budget cannot give what it does not have to give. Government can transfer money. It cannot transfer a hand to hold or an evening spent sitting beside a hospital bed. Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting America in the 1830s, saw that Americans handled their common needs through voluntary associations, and he thought the habit among the most important in the country's life. Democracy in America, which he published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840, warned that a soft, paternal government could take the place of those associations, and keep citizens in a kind of perpetual childhood. I am paraphrasing that warning, not quoting it.

Three, a budget cannot require anything of the person helped, and that is a failure, not a feature. A church that gives a family a month of groceries can, and often does, ask the family to join a budgeting class, to talk to a counselor, or to accept a mentor. That is not cruelty, it is how you help someone toward independence. A federal entitlement, by its nature, asks for paperwork and not much else.

Four, a budget cannot sustain itself on gratitude. A congregation's charity is funded by people who give because they believe, and it is staffed by people who volunteer because they care. That supply is renewable because it comes from conviction. A federal program is funded by taxes that a person pays because the law says so, and staffed by employees who work because they are paid. There is nothing wrong with paid work. But it is a different engine, and it does not run on the same fuel.

Five, a budget cannot be sued for doing it badly, but a neighbor can be forgiven. When a congregation stumbles, the person it failed can walk across the street and tell the pastor to his face. When a department stumbles, the person it failed files an appeal.

The strongest objection, answered

The best case for a federal role is not silly, and I should state it the way its defenders would. It runs: churches are not everywhere. Some neighborhoods have no strong congregation. Some needs are too large for any congregation, whether a disaster, a long-term illness or an economic collapse. And private charity is uneven, reaching some people and missing others. A national safety net, the argument goes, ensures that nobody falls through the gaps, and conservatives who care about the poor should not oppose it on principle.

I agree with a good deal of that. I am not proposing to abolish every federal program, and this post is not a case against a safety net. It is a case against the idea that government can replace what congregations give. Those are different claims.

Here is the answer in three steps. First, the gaps are real, and the right response is to fill them with the institution closest to the problem, which usually means local government or a charity, not a distant department. Conservatives call that principle subsidiarity, and I describe it in Subsidiarity, the 1931 Catholic principle every federalist should know. Second, the evidence that government crowds out congregations is a reason to be careful: when a program takes over a function, the volunteers who once did it tend to drift away, and the community loses the habit. Third, the constitutional design agrees. The Tenth Amendment reserves powers not delegated to the United States to the states or to the people, and "the people" includes the people who gather in basements on Wednesday nights. The founders did not design a national department of charity, and Madison, in Federalist No. 45, said the powers of the federal government are few and defined, and those of the states numerous and indefinite. You can read the founders' own words on the Founders page.

What congregations give that a budget cannot

Come back to the basement, because it is the heart of the matter.

A food pantry run by a church is not simply a distribution point. It is a place where the volunteer at the table was helped once herself, and says so. It is a place where the man in line is greeted by name. It is a place where, if he wants it, a conversation about God is available, and where, if he does not, he is still treated as a man made in the image of God. That last clause is the difference. It is a claim the department can never make, because the department's claim about the human being ends at "eligible."

The same is true of the casserole. A casserole is a mediocre nutritional delivery system. It is a superb expression of love. The recipient does not remember the macronutrients. She remembers who came. The history of American charity is full of institutions that grew from this insight, from the Salvation Army, which I describe in William and Catherine Booth, the Salvation Army and soup, soap and salvation, to the countless local ministries that never had a name. And the family, which came before every government, is where the habit starts, a theme I take up in the family came before the state, so why does the state act like a parent?.

Notice, too, what the department cannot do about the real thing. The real church charity is under constant pressure from regulation, as the story in Wisconsin told Catholic Charities it was not religious enough and lost 9-0 shows. The truest satire is the one that warns about what might be, and the truest conservatism is the one that protects what is.

I said at the beginning that nothing here was real, and I will end by repeating it. The Department of Neighborliness does not exist, and no serious person is proposing it. But look around at how many functions that once belonged to families, churches and neighbors now belong to an office with a form, and ask yourself whether we have been building it a piece at a time. The joke is only funny because we recognize the drift. The remedy is not more jokes. It is to give, to show up, and to keep the casserole where it belongs, in the hands of someone who knows your name.

The case in brief

1. The Department of Neighborliness is satire, but it dramatizes a real logic: when government replaces a human relationship with a benefit, it substitutes forms, waiting lists and categories for knowledge of a person.
2. The real record supports caution: the War on Poverty built a structure of rules, federal agencies report improper payments every year, and the 1996 welfare law recognized that faith-based groups reach people agencies cannot.
3. A budget cannot know your name, supply presence, ask something of the person helped, run on conviction or be forgiven like a neighbor.
4. The strongest objection, that churches are uneven and a safety net is needed, justifies filling gaps with the level closest to the problem, under subsidiarity and the Tenth Amendment, not replacing congregations.
5. What a congregation gives, being known and treated as made in God's image, is exactly what no program can write into its eligibility rules.

What you can do: pick one local ministry, a food pantry, a hospital visiting team or a meal train, and give it two hours this month.