Public Funds, Essential Agendas

(a slightly modified version of this was published as an op-ed in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on June 15, linked here.)

On June 4, the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) held a hearing titled “Public Funds, Private Agendas – NGO’s Gone Wild”.  The premise of this hearing, as described on oversight.house.gov, was “radical Democrats are using taxpayer dollars to advance destructive policies”.  During the hearing, the invited panel told stories of financial or political mismanagement in NGO’s (non-governmental organizations, or nonprofits) working on immigration or related to green energy development.  Scott Walter of the Capital Research Center asserted ‘Many NGOs serve the big government political agenda that fights to centralize power in Washington for the benefit of the left’s preferred political party.”

This doesn’t sound like an accurate description of nonprofits I know.  The city of Pittsburgh has an extraordinarily rich nonprofit ecosystem, with around 3,000 officially registered – a disproportionate slice of the 8,500 present in 11 Southwestern PA counties.  I’ve had the opportunity to work with dozens of them since I moved here to work with the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management (I’ve since moved into independent nonprofit consulting).  Many others also have first-hand experience.  In a 2020 study, Pittsburgh ranked seventh-best in the US for having residents who actively volunteer in their communities, with 38% of residents putting in 69 million hours of volunteer time per year. I generally wrap up a session with a nonprofit by reflecting how humbled and hopeful I feel when I see what so many people are willing to give in service of their communities. 

Pittsburghers, then, have a deep understanding of the nonprofit agenda.  They know nonprofits clean trash out of the rivers, provide adoption services for abandoned pets, showcase new photography, and teach soccer to kids.  Countless unpaid board members help develop and support those agendas, drafting strategic plans or raising money for domestic violence shelters, community choruses, and neighborhood improvement groups in their spare time.   

Before the 1980’s, the government provided many more social services directly.  As part of Ronald Reagan’s push to reduce government spending and create efficiencies the federal government began shifting those responsibilities to contractual arrangements with nonprofits, who were understood to have more local experience.  Many nonprofits I’ve worked with felt that any advantages were balanced by a sense that government wasn’t assuming responsibility for social issues or benefits in the same way.  A core function of government, we felt, was to benefit everyday people – supporting arts and culture, health care, housing, a social safety net.  Contractual funding made these benefits less stable.

While DOGE’s hearing on the 4th targeted nonprofits that are not aligned with the current president’s agenda, it is also part of a pattern.  USAID’s humanitarian funding was cut during a flood of the same sort of messages from Washington: Elon Musk posted about USAID on X 200 times in 24 hours, including that the agency was “a viper’s nest full of radical left Marxists who hate America”.  This vitriol erased any nuance of the wide, complex body of USAID’s work and primed the public for its closure.   If we’re talking about a viper’s nest, the only appropriate action is complete extermination.    

While only a sliver of US residents knew USAID’s work firsthand, almost everyone in the US has benefited from nonprofits.  We must push back on this narrative from our own lived experience.  We’ve been to the library and we’ve used the free counseling services.  We have seen how the organizations that fixes the broken porch and windows of an older person down the block protects our property values, and how the nature center down the road enriches the lives of our children.  Many of our livelihoods are in the sector - nonprofits in Pennsylvania collectively employ more than 817,000 workers, making up 15.7% percent of the Commonwealth’s workforce. 

We can do so knowing there are robust protections already in place against rogue agendas.  Federal grants are awarded to nonprofits based on a rigorous process that evaluates their capacity and scores them against a variety of metrics.  Policies and assurances, executed by independent experts, are designed to maintain a fair, objective process based on material facts in the applications and without conflicts of interest.  Protections don’t stop once money is awarded.  Nonprofits will readily detail the exhaustive reporting requirements for such grants – transparency is built in. Nonprofits receiving federal funding that spend over $1 million in a fiscal year receive an additional audit covering their entire financial operation. 

When you hear disparaging rhetoric about nonprofits wasting federal money in the next months, remember that if Federal money is withdrawn from contracts and not incorporated back into government service, there will only be holes.  Let’s tell the story, instead, of how government can – and should - support us caring for each other..