Has 2025 been a disastrous year for nonprofits? Allegedly so:
For nonprofit organizations and charities — which the administration and Congress have scrutinized, criticized and stripped of federal money — it’s been a repeat of the terrible difficulties of 2008, when the rapid onset of recession led donors to cut back on contributions.
At least one out of three nonprofit organizations experienced a disruption of services in the first half of the year from the loss of federal funds, the Urban Institute reported this fall.
Worse, a lot of nonprofits are feeling unloved:
What’s worse is the isolation that leaders of nonprofits have felt as the austerity out of Washington hit them….
Anyone who thinks a $7 trillion annual budget constitutes “austerity” lives on a different planet from the rest of us. But to the extent that federal funding of nonprofits has actually been cut, that is a good thing. It was nonprofits that carried out the multifold frauds in Minnesota that have roiled the national news. And many nonprofits, even when they are not committing outright fraud, are nothing but slush funds for the Left. One thinks of Stacey Abrams, who set up a “nonprofit” and immediately got $2 billion from the Biden administration, even though her organization had never done a thing.
Nonprofits have been a major source of corruption, and government funding of them should be cut, if not eliminated altogether. My home state, Minnesota, is shoveling out $250 million to nonprofits in the current biennium. While some dollars no doubt go to deserving charities, much of it is just liberal back-scratching. If a charity is actually deserving, it should be able to raise money from private donors. If there is nevertheless a legitimate need for government funding, it should be a government program, subject to the usual oversight of government programs. As many have pointed out, if you are a non-governmental organization and you go out of business when you lose government funding, you were never a non-governmental organization.
The linked article tries to pretend that hard times for nonprofits are not only the result of government cutbacks. However:
Nationwide, about two-thirds of nonprofit organizations rely on at least some federal or state funding, in addition to private sources. But no charity, not even the richest foundation (as people like Bill Gates have noted), has the impact of federal resources and support.
See, that’s the problem. Charities that rely on government subsidies should be transparent to the public and subject to the full panoply of oversight that applies to government programs.
Of course, it is not true that all nonprofits are struggling. I run a medium-sized nonprofit, and we are having a record year for revenue. We don’t get a dollar from any government, nor do we want government funding. Of course, our efforts are devoted in considerable part to advocating for reduced government spending. Why on Earth would government support that? On the contrary, liberal nonprofits are commonly given government money to lobby the government for more money.
If you want to avoid corruption in the nonprofit world, get the government out of it.
