CV NEWS FEED // Nonprofit organizations are misusing government funds and contributing to the downfall of large American cities, according to a recent article from American Affairs Journal.
Freelance writer Jonathan Ireland wrote for American Affairs Journal that so-called “nonprofit” organizations are actually making huge profits off of government funds, essentially becoming the opposite of everything they claim to be.
“Nonprofits that self-righteously declare themselves providers of homeless services actively lobby to make homelessness worse in order to increase their own funding,” Ireland wrote, continuing:
[N]onprofit organizations hire convicted felons—including murderers, gang leaders, sex offenders, and rapists—who go on to commit more felonies while receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts; and the executives of nonprofits, the very people in charge of institutions whose stated purpose is not to make money, earn millions of dollars while catastrophically failing to deliver the public services we are paying them to provide.Ireland added that the “profound conflicts of interest created by outsourcing government services to private nonprofits” is only made worse by the government’s lack of oversight when it comes to funding the nonprofits.
“It is a regular occurrence that money given to nonprofits is misdirected in a way ruinously contrary to the public interest,” he wrote. “In especially egregious cases, money given to nonprofits finds its way into the pockets of people who never would have been hired by a government agency due to either a lack of competence or a disqualifying criminal history.”
Ireland also wrote that an investigation in San Francisco discovered that the city had paid over $25 million in taxpayer dollars to delinquent or suspended nonprofits, while another $65 million was paid to nonprofits that were ineligible for government funding.
In San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Chicago, among other cities, nonprofits have used government funds to employ unqualified convicted felons, who frequently mismanage the money and commit more violent crimes while employed by nonprofits claiming to keep the peace and reduce crime.
Ireland added that “progressivism” has actually led to worse living conditions in large cities. According to him, progressives tend to want to fund “community-based organizations,” referring to non-governmental organizations or nonprofits.
Citing Portland as an example, Ireland said that this only privatizes the government and makes matters worse.
“Portland … has been suffering from a serious trash crisis for the past several years, due both to the city’s soaring homeless population and the government’s refusal to enforce antidumping laws,” he wrote, continuing:
Portland’s response to the festering trash piles now blighting a once-beautiful city has not been to dramatically increase the government’s capacity to pick up and process garbage; instead, Portland, in conjunction with the state of Oregon, has paid millions of dollars to nonprofits to deal with the trash problem.
As Portland outsourced trash collection to private nonprofit organizations, the ability of the government to collect trash has been gutted by budget cuts and a lack of resources.
According to Ireland, as cities—especially West Coast cities—deal with rising homeless populations and poor living standards, taxes tend to rise as well, which then get paid to nonprofits, which in turn do nothing to solve the problems.
“By funding inefficient nonprofits instead of more centralized, accountable government initiatives, progressive cities have high taxes but poor services; residents receive nothing in return for the taxes they pay,” he wrote, adding that the population in these cities is beginning to decrease, while crime and disease are beginning to rise due to unsafe and unsanitary conditions.
“The inability of nonprofits to properly manage services results in European taxes for third-world state capacity,” Ireland wrote, adding:
Residents don’t know what the problem is: they don’t know that their taxes go to “violence interrupters” who are convicted felons; they don’t know affordable housing nonprofits use taxpayer money to lobby against affordable housing; and they don’t know money is being misallocated due to insufficient oversight of nonprofits.
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