May have been a recent letter to my congressman that did the trick. I
asked them to either make the search engine work like the help page
says it does or make the help page describe what it really does.
My first letter to my congressman rebuffed by the White House. They
claimed it was not censorship since related terms worked, and the
search engine remained as it was. My second letter said in effect
"It's a bug if not deliberate, so fix it." Now they have.
Commenters at James' blog:
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2007/02/global-warming-abolished.html
pointed out that "faith based" and other phrases did not work as
documented.
Testing at whitehouse.gov indicates that all these phrases seem to
work right now.