Taxpayers have been footing the bill for progressive programs without knowing it. We need real reform of the NGO grant process.

Glenn Reynolds makes a provocative argument: Republicans in Congress should “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.” Reynolds cites exotic USAID grants and notes that “many ‘non-governmental’ entities are really just fronts for government activities that Americans would never stand for if Washington attempted them directly. . . . The lack of accountability also made NGOs a perfect conduit for funneling money to Washington insiders.” 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.

There are doubtless abuses that are rife for reform. Certainly, wherever grants are made by one executive administration, it should be easier for its successor to pull the plug. Democrats have no right to permanent federal funding of liberal and progressive activist allies that is impervious to election results. Nor should they be able to accomplish the same thing by embedding funding in programs that are nominally run by states — consider Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, argued earlier this month before the Supreme Court, in which South Carolina has been fighting in court for seven years trying to stop state Medicaid funds from going to Planned Parenthood. Part of the problem is that Congress, which is supposed to control the purse strings, has been too open-ended in a lot of the ways it hands out our money.

All that being said, when government chooses to fund particular programs, it’s worth considering the alternatives. NGOs are just another word for government contractors. There are undoubted pitfalls to turning large, private institutions into contractors that can be made to dance the government’s tune — as witness the fight over research funds given to Harvard or semi-public entities such as PBS and NPR. But the government has always used private contractors not only to provide services to Uncle Sam (such as defense contractors) but also to perform various services to the public, from school choice programs to private prisons and toll collectors. One of the big initiatives of the George W. Bush administration was to allow more faith-based groups to act in the NGO/contractor role. The alternative isn’t less entrenchment of partisan allies but more federal employees, who are harder to fire.

Real reform of the NGO grant process is needed, and perhaps the end result looks more like the spoils system of old, in which each change of partisan control of the executive means new NGO contractors for whose performance the executive will be responsible. But the total abolition of third-party federal grant dispensers is probably not just unrealistic but apt to produce unintended consequences.