WHAT SHOULD WE CALL NONPROFITS THAT GET 99 PERCENT OF THEIR FUNDING FROM GOVERNMENT? Government “tools?” How about government “extensions?” At the Environmental Protection Agency, they’re called “cheap labor sources.” Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has been digging into a massive database of more than 100,000 EPA grants compiled by Open The Books.
He found six non-profits that got 99 percent of their funding from federal grants to provide jobs for seniors doing EPA work, including retired engineers willing to work for the maximum starting pay of $12.27 per hour. Average salary for a full-time EPA engineer in the civil service is nearly $89,000 or $44 per hour.
Now for me, it isn’t about the EPA part of this (although it does concern me and it should for you as well). As I have recounted before, this goes on all the time where organizations formerly known as charities (as they used to be known as when they were funded voluntarily by those in Civil Society) all pitch politicians (e.g., selectmen, budget committee) at the local level, commissioners at the county level, and at the State and Federal legislatures get pitched as well during budget seasons.
Oh, they come in with lots of stories – and they all talk the game of how they can turn a little dollar amount into vast amounts of money. And they do the same thing, these “social services organizations” or Non-Governmental Organizations”, at each of the levels they target. What they are doing is play one level against the other but with smoke and mirrors. Like politicians whose true purpose is to get re-elected every cycle, these parasites have but one mission in life and that is to get “re-funded” every session. And they’ll say that they are “cooperative” or a “partner with us” (when I was on our BudComm). One even said that their organization was really a PART of my town’s government – until I demanded for them to open their books and to allow US to determine their budgets like we were doing for the town departments. She, after telling our BudComm that her organization was part and parcel of the town (even though I KNEW she was double or triple-dipping at each level of government as she was with us), got rather (nay, REALLY) indignant at that suggestion. She walked out.
But this is where we are today and I hated it when the “Quality of Lifers” kept telling me that “times have changed, get with the program” and go with the flow. And I knew, deep down, that this was wrong.
Government is Government and should stay doing that limited function it should do and do those small number of things exceedingly well. Leave the rest to us, the individuals in Civil Society. These organizations do their begging to government officials and politicians because it is EASY. It is convenient – set times to beg, set places in which to beg, and just a small number of people to convince.
It has become cast in concrete because this way IS easier and more convenient – and none of them looked approvingly at me when I told them to go out and to the REAL work of obtaining “community support” – by contacting the entire people that make up a community. Hard? Yes. More expensive in time and effort? Yes. But more honest and true.
Sadly, as we see from the opening quote, it isn’t that way – and these organization are quite happy being parasites on government instead of real partners with the communities they say they serve. Instead, this process insulates them from them – for who they really serve are the politicians.
After all, they are the ones that write the checks. Not the people.
