How Democrats used NGOs to end-run voters: A ‘parallel government’

I’m often darkly amused by common examples of inherently false nomenclature:  “Jumbo shrimp.”  “Government ethics.” “Unbiased news media.” 

And one of our society’s biggest falsehoods-in-a-name: “Non-governmental organizations.”

Until recently, these groups have been widely seen as international, idealized versions of?domestic nonprofits.?

We thought of them as do-good organizations set up by people who really care — about the environment, or poor people, or children, or freedom.

We imagined they raise money, help the downtrodden, send out press releases and engage in other private activities to promote the causes they favor. 

They’re not government entities, we thought — the very name says that — but a species of private charity whose good intentions deserve the benefit of any doubt.

Perhaps some NGOs do operate in that way.

But as we’ve learned recently, partly as the result of Department of Government Efficiency digging, many “non-governmental” entities are really just fronts for government activities that Americans would never stand for if Washington attempted them directly.

For example, America’s border crisis was funded in large part by President Joe Biden’s government, which sent large sums of money in the form of grants to various NGOs that helped train migrants on how to get to the United States — and how to claim asylum when they arrived.

NGOs helped the illegal immigrants with expenses on their way, and then provided legal resources and more than $22 billion worth of assistance for them — including cash for cars, home loans and business start-ups — once they got in. 

This was US taxpayer money, laundered through “independent” organizations that served to promote goals contrary to US law, but consistent with the policy preferences of the Biden administration.

Under President Trump, this funding halted — and, unsurprisingly, the flow of illegal immigrants did, too.??

Likewise, the weird wave of sudden global enthusiasm for “trans rights” and novel ideas about gender turns out to have been largely funded by the US government through USAID grants. 

Federally funded NGOs spent millions on everything from a transgender opera in Colombia, to a campaign promoting “being LGBTQ in the Caribbean,” to an LGBTQ community center in Bratislava, Slovakia.

As data expert Jennica Pounds (“DataRepublican” on X) put it, “Over the last few months, we’ve come to a realization that should have landed much harder: NGOs weren’t just adjacent to government.” 

They were tools of government, “the parallel government,” Pounds wrote, specifically doing things that Washington bureaucrats knew full well they couldn’t easily do themselves.

The big surprise is that we’re so surprised this has been going on.

The lack of accountability also made NGOs a perfect conduit for funneling money to Washington insiders. 

It’s been a profitable cycle: Politicians fund agencies; agencies make grants to NGOs; NGOs hire politicians’ wives and offspring — and sometimes the politicians themselves, once they’ve left office. 

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), for example, voted to award $14.2 million to Ocean Conservancy since 2008, Fox News reported ?— and the NGO, in turn, paid his wife, Sandra Whitehouse, and her firm $2.7 million for consulting work.

No wonder the Washington establishment went crazy when Trump and DOGE started cutting off such funds. 

And it was striking to see how many NGOs folded their tents almost immediately when Trump shut down USAID’s sprawling and largely unmonitored grant-making activities. 

An NGO that can’t function without government money is anything but “non-governmental.”

This is part of a global pattern. 

Most developed countries are, at least nominally, democracies — but pretty much all of them have evolved various techniques for ensuring that the voters know as little as possible about, and have as little influence as possible on, what’s being done with their money. 

The bureaucracy — described as far back as the 1930s as a “headless fourth branch of government” subject to no real political control — makes most of the decisions. 

Taxpayers’ money is doled out via vast omnibus bills that make scrutiny, much less actual control, of what is being spent nearly impossible.

And then, to make it even more opaque, much of the money flows to NGOs and domestic nonprofits that spend it in obscure and often untraceable ways, so voters have no way of knowing, or ever objecting to, what is happening with their cash.  

DOGE’s ongoing federal spending probe has made all this apparent. 

But it’s going to take political will to do something about it. 

Drastic cuts to federal spending in general is a first step: Republicans now hammering out a budget bill in Congress must hold firm on that promise.

But they must also move to drastically limit — or even outright ban — federal grants to private organizations, and at the very least to require rigorous audits of every grant that’s made. 

Because now that we know how our money has been misspent, it can’t be business as usual any longer.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a professor of law at the University of Tennessee and founder of the InstaPundit.com blog.