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Several hours have passed and this is still the top post, so please forgive me for replying a second time.
Here's a good theory for why this is happening.
It's all about immigration.Edit: A large part of it is about immigration.https://x.com/njhochman/status/1884339632210600161
The whole thread is worth a read but it paints a damning picture of the NGOs who receive these federal grants:
So, one one hand, the government is funding ICE to deport illegal aliens. On the other hand it's funding thousands of NGOs to encourage illegal immigration. The rot goes really deep, and it's astounding both how many of these orgs there are and how much money they get from the federal government. It's going to be really hard to untangle the mess.
I've been following this Twitter account that is digging into these NGOs on a more systematic level. I'll admit it's a bit of a Gish gallop, but once you see dozens of examples of far-left NGOs who get nearly all their money from the federal government, it's not hard to want to burn it all down. In her words (the owner of the Twitter account):
If the Trump administration went about rooting out partisan activity deliberately, it would take a lot longer than 4 years. So that's probably why they are doing it all at once. But I still think they should make carve-outs for the best stuff, at least temporarily.
Is there a universe in which a contrived set of laws allows the executive to blanket ban all NGOs (Russia/China) style?
No. But an easy way to go after NGOs that assist illegal immigrants is to treat them as what they effectively are: organized crime.
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NGO is UNspeak for any organisation which is neither controlled by government nor a for-profit business. Your local golf club is an NGO.
Banning (or licensing) all NGOs is massively overinclusive for a free country. Even banning political activity by NGOs would shut down Heritage and suchlike. If enforced enthusiastically, stopping or chilling Harvard University (also an NGO) and suchlike from speaking about politically sensitive topics - a list which which currently include meteorology (climate change is a partisan issue), basic pharmacology (using ivermectin to treat non-worm infections is a partisan issue), and increasingly arithmetic (the fact that Republican budgets don't add up is a partisan issue) etc. - would destroy large parts of American science.
A country as rich as America could ban NGOs which accept foreign funding, but that doesn't help much when the largest funders of wokestupid are domestic (I think in the US it is the Ford and Hewlett foundations).
Any country could stop contracting NGOs to deliver government programs, although again you only want a blanket ban if you are planning to move a lot of work back in-house which was contracted for good reasons. The fakecharities project in the UK (run by the libertarian Adam Smith Institute, itself an NGO which has done consultancy work on government contracts) argued that charities that get more than 10% of their funding from the government should be prohibited from engaging in political activity, which might work.
Graham Factor has a nice article(just apply for access, it only takes a day or so to get approved) which includes a part on how de-facto outsourcing of government work to NGOs gives you the worst of all worlds, especially in the context of the police: The same inefficiency as the government but with none of the accountability.
I don't think NGOs need to be banned, but the current reality of government funding of unaccountable NGOs combined with a revolving door between either of them is quite dysfunctional. Nothing raises my cynicism like seeing a high-level government worker being so outrageously incompetent as to lose their position (a tall order to begin with!) due to public pressure, only for them to manage some multi-million government-funded NGO immediately thereafter.
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Not exactly. You have governments using NGOs as part of their own operations. For instance crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman funds MiSK Foundation which in turn funds many activities either directly or indirectly. Similarly Chinese govenment funds Confucius Institute which is one of the web of organizations working under United Front umbrella to project soft power of Chinese government.
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Bit of an aside, but it's incredible how the Internet allows people to contribute through sheer autistic dedication, even if they're literally deaf mute cripples IRL.
I'd also recommend oilfield rando if you don't follow him. He just does individual grants.
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Trump may be doing it because of immigration, but it's not just immigration. DEI/*-Studies. Trans stuff. Environmental/Climate change stuff. Homeless stuff. Criminal justice "reform". Not sure about Palestine stuff but maybe. You name a left-wing issue and it's being funded by an interlocking set of NGOs who are probably siphoning at least some of their money off the US Federal Government. That's the largest part of what I call "Left, Inc." (another part being ordinary for-profit companies which have been co-opted, and another the mainstream-left press), and if Trump can cut it off, it'll be "yuge".
What DataRepublican and others have shown is that many of these NGO's are not just receiving some money from the federal government, it nearly their entire budget.
It's as if the federal government has a 4th branch that is not bound by the rules of the other three and is the exclusive property of the Democratic Party.
The term "Fourth Estate" is as old as the press. It serves the actual Fourth Estate's purposes very well when the low-information voters think it's the media, but if the Fourth Estate is a body, the media is just its Mouth.
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There was a push on Twitter to start calling them "Para-Governmental Organizations" instead of "Non Governmental Organizations" because they are intertwined with the government but don't have normal oversight like government groups do.
British English already has a word for this: quango (from quasi-non-governmental organisation)
The meaning of quango shifted very early - the new meaning was backronymed to "quasi-autonomous national governmental organisation".
The current meaning of quango is a central government organisation with deliberately blurred lines of accountability to the responsible minister. The boundaries are intentionally fuzzy, but the central examples are non-departmental public bodies and non-ministerial departments.
This is now the sole de facto meaning of quango - which, for the avoidance of doubt, is a really useful word with its current meaning and the US should probably adopt it. The older meaning referring to a government-organised NGO had ceased to be widely used by 1997.
Incidentally, GONGO is a term that is actually used by the foreign policy establishment to criticise the fake NGOs set up by authoritarian regimes like China. It could usefully be used more widely.
I propose a pithier definition: any organisation set up by the government and not meaningfully accountable to the government.
As always, of course, QUANGO is a concept cluster for which any given definition can only be an approximation and any formal definition is likely to be a malicious mis-classification (EDIT: the latter isn’t pointed at you @MadMonzer).
In other words, something the government called up that they can not put down?
More like power laundering: Government A (1975) makes a quango, passes certain powers to it, vests it with authority, appoints its leaders, sends all relevant expertise there and then steps back. Future governments B (1980), C, D, etc. generally don't care enough to retrieve the relevant powers and if they do, they will find it very difficult. Press releases will be written about the important work the relevant quango does (the work is important, that's why it was laundered) and the expertise they have.
Imagine a UK government getting rid of the Office for Budget Responsibility (a real and very powerful quango)! The headlines write themselves. And the fact that the OBR has been consistently wrong and biased in its predictions, not to mention being inherently prejudiced to certain conclusion by dint of its remit and setup, is by-the-by.
To be fair to the left, this style of government really got going under Thatcher's conservatives, who thought that these bodies would permanently remove import powers from future socialist politicians and trade unions. Thatcher's conservatives were mostly small-state libertarians, so they didn't want the power themselves, and they tried to put it where no government would be able to get it back. They were too preoccupied with the trade unions to really consider the future trajectory of the PMC, and nobody foresaw Tony Blair's rise to power. It's why I'm quite harsh about British conservatives: they still haven't learned that if you throw away the power vested in you by parliament, somebody else will pick it up.
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I'm not surprised, though I'm certainly not a forensic accountant able to actually figure that out. But I did notice that "New NGO You Never Heard Of And Is An Instant Expert On Everything In This Field" (that's the press part at work) was often funded by grants from other NGOs, which in turn came from other NGOs and larger foundations, and many of those received government grants. My point was just that it's not just immigration they do this with.
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Can you copy and paste or screenshot the thread? Twitter is often unreadable if you don't have an account and/or use any effective browser privacy tools/settings.
I'm already satisfied by evidence of NGOs engaging in "open borders with extra steps" jiggery pokery, but pausing all federal grants because of immigration NGOs brings us back to:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1884339632210600161.html
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https://unrollnow.com/status/1884339632210600161
In regards to its crudeness, it's not easy to figure out what these NGOs are up to. You not only have to track the grants, but you have to track who the grantees themselves grant to. Sometimes its a network that includes loops where A owns B and C, and then C owns part of A, D, and E. They all receive grants from the government, other NGOs, individuals, and even grant to each other.
Of course, it's not impossible to figure out if money is being used to encourage illegal immigration. But it would take a very long time.
Maybe it's easy to strike it all and then add back the necessary stuff. I hope they do so quickly.
And they're getting grants from the USDA? And the Departments of Commerce, Defense, Energy, Transportation, and VA, plus the FCC, Library of Congress, NASA, and Social Security Administration? Some of the programs listed, I could believe, but why would it be necessary to pause all of them?
Yes, of course all those departments award grants that are used for DEI, encouraging immigration, or other progressive political purposes. But you should tweet this at DataRepublican and see what she can dig up. It might surprise you!
That said, if you want an argument that Trump did the right thing here, please find someone else. I don't think he should have frozen all funding. I can see why he did it, but I think he should have taken more time. Even if the net gains are huge, people will be hurt and it could have been partially avoided.
And that is what some people mean when they repeat the phrase "war is hell".
War is politics (by a particular means), and good people are going to get killed/the works of their lives are going to get wasted.
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I'm missing something - I thought we were having a conversation based on your comment:
Are they throwing out the Congressionally-appropriated babies with the DEI-HR Lady-Complex bathwater, as the memo states, or is it "all about immigration," as you say is a good theory? If the latter, why did they need to pause grants from all the departments I listed? The Trump administration's stance on immigration is far from "strategically ambiguous."
Point taken. It's not all about immigration, just a very large chunk of it. Thank you for the clarification. I've edited my original comment.
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Use xcancel.com .
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