Search the Constitution till you’re blue in the face, but you won’t find any mention of non-government organizations. Yet these NGOs, these so-called nonprofits, play a huge role in the way our government operates and in the way it enriches those fortunate enough to be connected to it.

As David Strom writes at Hot Air, “Think of an NGO you hate — say, the World Economic Forum or The Aspen Institute, or perhaps The Atlantic Council. Or maybe the Brookings Institute — and you will find that government money flows into them at prodigious rates. You will also find that they are filled with the friends and family of the people funneling that money.”

To cite just one example of this corrupt racket, let’s consider the case of Rhode Island Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has backed legislation that has routed millions of dollars to his wife’s environmental nonprofit and into her own pockets. The organization is called the Ocean Conservancy, and since 2008, it’s been awarded 19 government grants and some $14.2 million in funding — nearly half of it having been funneled to the organization last fall and nearly $2.7 million of it going to Whitehouse’s wife. Not a bad gig for picking up trash on beaches.

And we wonder how politicians get so rich and why we so revile these smarmy grifters.

“NGOs are actually, for the most part, GOs that get to hide their expenses in many cases,” Strom adds. “Did you know that Black Lives Matter and the Soros prosecutors were indirectly funded by USAID? I didn’t until [Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency] ferreted it out.”

Not surprisingly, the arc of the immoral NGO bends to the left. Here, the recent congressional testimony of the Daily Signal’s Tyler O'Neil is illuminating, especially in connecting the dots between George Soros and USAID.

Witness @Tyler2Oneil breaks down the connection between USAID and George Soros pic.twitter.com/gtMIvXTJK8

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) February 26, 2025

How big is the nonprofit racket? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 300,000 nonprofits accounted for 12.8 million jobs and 9.9% of the nation’s private-sector employment in 2022. They aren’t all bad, of course, nor all wasteful and corrupt. But given those numbers, the opportunities for fraud, waste, and abuse are enormous.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember about NGOs, though, is that they aren’t designed to solve problems — only to soothe them. Think about it: If your cash-cow NGO actually solved world hunger or cured cancer or cleaned the oceans or ended homelessness or fixed blighted neighborhoods or even repaired the destruction in Haiti after that deadly earthquake in 2010, then it will have worked itself out of business. And the Beltway elite can’t have that.

Here, we’re reminded of what Donald Trump told his then-nominee for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, whom he’d named to head a wasteful and bureaucratic department that he wanted to abolish: “Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.” If NGOs worked this way, they might actually do some good rather than simply redistributing wealth from the taxpayers to the politicians, bureaucrats, and their friends and families. (As an aside, did you know that the three wealthiest counties in the entire nation — Loudoun, Fairfax, and Howard — all surround our nation’s capital? Wouldn’t it seem that these bastions of wealth would be located in, say, obscenely rich Silicon Valley instead of Washington, DC? And what do you think it says about us as a nation that government is our most lucrative industry?)

Sadly, it’s not just the NGOs that are getting rich off the federal government; it’s also state and local governments. Reason’s J.D. Tuccille reports on a recently published academic paper that notes: “Federal grants to local governments increased from $135 billion to $1.2 trillion between 1990 and 2022. The money came from 1,670 federal programs, prompting concern from agencies including the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO).”

Of course, any “concern” within OMB or the GAO about this largess is entirely attributable to the all-new cost-cutting efforts of the Trump administration through Musk’s DOGE enterprise. Were this a Biden or Harris administration, we’d be oblivious to all this, and our $37 trillion national debt would be cascading along unencumbered. Indeed, as The Washington Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports, “The Biden administration ditched the first Trump administration’s U.S. Agency for International Development vetting reforms — and went on to send ‘vast sums of U.S. money’ to Middle Eastern countries that ended up in the hands of terrorists,” according to the congressional testimony last week of a former senior USAID official.

More concerning than even the dollar amount, though, is the corruption that this breeds at the local level. As Tuccille writes:

Why would federal grants lead to large increases in corrupt behavior by local officials? The researchers speculate that the growing flow of federal grants, especially as they come from increasing numbers of sources in D.C., overwhelm local oversight capabilities and ‘provide opportunistic actors with an expectation that they can engage in corrupt practices before such systems are adequately implemented.’ New and expanding flows of cash also mean practices for using the money aren’t well-established, making diversion harder to detect. While the authors don’t address the issue, it might also be that local officials feel less moral responsibility for money rained on them by distant federal bureaucrats rather than extracted from taxpayers they may know and see on the street.

The system is clearly broken, and we taxpayers have never been more clueless about where all our money is going. What would the Founders think? If James Madison couldn’t undertake to lay his finger upon “that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents,” imagine how confounded he’d be today.

“At the bottom of all totalitarian doctrines,” wrote libertarian economist and philosopher Ludwig von Mises during the throes of World War II, “lies the belief that the rulers are wiser and loftier than their subjects and that they therefore know better what benefits those ruled than they themselves.”

Nowhere is this belief more perversely expressed than in the utterly unaccountable way our government spends the taxpayers’ money.