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Notes -
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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