Federal marriage initiatives seen as cost-effective

One way to save some of the billions of dollars spent each year on broken and struggling families is to promote healthy marriages, a Bush administration official said last week at a congressional hearing on the importance of marriage.

"As assistant secretary [of Health and Human Services] for children and families, I oversee 65 different social programs at a cost of nearly $47 billion each year," Wade F. Horn said Wednesday at the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions subcommittee on children and families.

"Go down the list of these programs -- child welfare, child-support enforcement, programs for runaway youth, antipoverty programs -- the need for each of these programs is either created or exacerbated by the breakup of families and marriages."

Roland C. Warren, president of the National Fatherhood Initiative, said research shows married fathers who live at home are most likely to support and protect children from infancy through adolescence.

Stan Weed, president of the Institute for Research and Evaluation in Salt Lake City, told the panel that "community marriage policies" -- in which a city's clergy agree not to marry couples unless they have received counseling -- help drive down divorce rates.

"At the policy level," Mr. Weed said, "we would do well to invest in and further investigate this and similar approaches" to see whether divorce rates could be affected on a larger scale.

Former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating and author Barbara Dafoe Whitehead testified about how marriage benefits men, women, children and society, including state economies.

The Bush administration has called for $360 million a year to be spent on pro-marriage research and activities as part of welfare reform, but the legislation is tied up in the Senate.

"If we are ever going to prevent the need for these services, we must begin preventing these problems from happening in the first place," Mr. Horn said.

That is why the Bush administration has begun funding "healthy marriage" approaches in federal child-support, child-welfare and adoption programs, he added.

Last week, Mr. Horn's agency announced that it had awarded $3.7 million for "healthy marriage and parental relationships" projects in Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts and Michigan. This makes seven such projects funded by HHS, said Tommy G. Thompson, the agency's secretary.

At least two more Senate marriage hearings are planned this month, said aides to Republican Sens. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Sam Brownback of Kansas.

Separately, the Center for Law and Social Policy released a state-by-state roundup of about 200 government-funded pro-marriage efforts under way.

The wealth of activities confirm that "promotion of healthy marriages is now on the policy agenda," said Theodora Ooms, lead author of the center's report.