If something is a “nongovernment organization,” wouldn’t any sentient person assume it has nothing to do with “government” in any way, shape, fashion or form?
A lemonade stand is a “nongovernment organization” ― unless, of course, Little Johnny is receiving $100 million in government funds from USAID. Any number of wonderful charities can be considered true “nongovernment” entities since they are funded by private donations without any federal or state government assistance, such as Rotary Club International.
The second any organization takes $1 from a federal, state or local government ― funded by general taxpayers ― they cease being fully private. They then transform into some form of a “government-sponsored enterprise” (GSE), yet another acronym produced by wonderful government wordsmithing.
“Nongovernment” means the things an organization can do to help people is not something our government should be doing in the first place.
Otherwise, it should be called a “government program,” and Congress should have full oversight authority over every dollar spent each year.
Democrats are masters at using the English language to their advantage politically. Support for abortion becomes “pro-choice” to capitalize on the American predilection for “freedom” and individual decision making. “Baseline budgeting” becomes a tool used by people who want more government to make any smaller increase in federal spending than what they want to sound like a “draconian” cut. (They never are.)
Masterful twisting of the English language manifests itself in the clever but oddly negative connotation of the phrase “nonessential workers” that government uses when it sends workers home in case of severe snowstorms. “If most federal workers are ‘nonessential,’” as former Congressman Alex McMillan used to wonder out loud in House Budget Committee hearings, “why do we need them in the first place?”
The way liberals twist the English language has produced a multibillion industry where the U.S. taxpayer dutifully pays their taxes to Washington, which then takes their hard-earned money and sends it to an agency such as USAID (U.S. Agency for International Assistance) as a federal appropriation, ostensibly for altruistic purposes such as providing clean water and medical supplies for innocent people in war-torn Sudan.
Once the money hits a USAID office anywhere in the world, some may get used for its stated intended “charitable” purpose. However, much of it gets disbursed to any number of fancy-sounding NGOs headed by former Democratic officials from the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as staff from Capitol Hill offices such as former Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
And then hardly anyone can explain where the money has gone.
NGOs have become a Kafkaesque version of what government should look like. They have become cesspools of perfidy and corruption.
Before President Bill Clinton came on the scene in 1993, hardly any entity was designated as an NGO. In his efforts to reform government, he slashed the number of direct federal employees by more than 180,000 to just under 2 million FTEs (full-time equivalent) in total. The number of “official” federal employees has stayed roughly the same ever since.
However, the number of contractors outside of government and people employed by NGOs has exploded to more than 9 million by some estimates.
These are private employees paid by defense contractors and NGOs, all supported by your federal taxes plus whatever is raised through repeated borrowings, which add to our national debt.
Stacey Abrams says the Biden administration allocated $2 billion to her NGO, which was intended to buy new energy-efficient appliances for poor people, thereby solving climate change and poverty at the same time.
Biden should have just written a $2 billion check and asked Amazon to deliver 4 million new appliances from its existing inventory around the country to needy families. They would have been delivered that afternoon or the next day.
Raise your hand if you really believe Abrams’ NGO is even capable of delivering 4 million new kitchen appliances to 4 million homes below the poverty level in the next 12 months, five years or even 10 years from now.
She has no track record of ever having done anything like this in her work history.
Without federal taxpayer money flowing through federal agencies such as USAID, most NGOs would cease to exist. Private foundations set up by wealthy people, such as the Ford Foundation and every philanthropy in the George Soros/Arabella Advisors network, could fill the void.
At that moment, everyone will be able to see which organizations are in it to really help people in distress and which are in it solely for political gain and profit.
Nongovernment organizations should stay away from acting in a government-like capacity. Shut them down.
