Why was Decarlos Brown Jr. — with a long and violent rap sheet, not to mention severe mental illness — free to stab Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte light-rail train last month?
Soft-on-crime judges, district attorneys and politicians are part of the problem, but they have not acted alone.
Private foundations have encouraged and funded dangerous policies, working hand in hand with government.
The MacArthur Foundation contributed $1 million in 2020 to the Safety and Justice Challenge in Mecklenburg County, NC — where Brown was arrested multiple times — “to continue safely reducing the jail population.” The group gave another $350,000 in 2022.
The Soros Foundation has been instrumental in electing district attorneys who want to defund the police and get rid of cash bail and refuse to prosecute drug crimes.
And Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom solicited half a million dollars from the James Irvine Foundation to help migrants evade federal immigration authorities.
It’s long past time to break up these “public-private partnerships.”
And maybe fundraisers are coming to that conclusion themselves.
“It is unknown what the interdependencies are going to be between philanthropy and government in the future,” Council on Foundations President Kathleen Enright told The Chronicle of Philanthropy this year, reflecting on COVID-era coordination.
The pandemic is over, she said, and we must reset the relationship between polities and nonprofits.
The co-dependency began in earnest with the 1960s creation of numerous federal programs, from Medicaid to the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities, that made funds available to private organizations carrying out quasi-governmental functions.
It accelerated in the ensuing decades as these programs’ budgets expanded and Congress established yet more in education, the environment, energy and other areas.
Private foundations encouraged grantees to seek government funding to free up their own funds for new enterprises, which in turn would go to the feds themselves.
An Urban Institute study concluded that in 2024 governments at all levels (though primarily the federal government) gave $300 billion in grants to nonprofit organizations, making up between 20% and 30% of their budgets.
That’s about three times the amount — $110 billion — private foundations give to the same groups.
(The rest comes from private donors and services that make nonprofits, well, profits. Your local YMCA charges people to join the swim team, for instance.)
Today’s charitable sector is far more dependent on government funds than on foundation grants.
The same study concluded roughly one-third of nonprofit organizations across the country received grants from one or another level of government.
These groups may have no choice but to change their arrangement with government.
The Trump administration is cracking down on unconstitutional diversity-equity-inclusion programs many large foundations have been funding.
And it’s been cutting international-aid programs that have traditionally created partnerships with private donors.
But this realignment couldn’t come at a better time. Thanks to yet another booming year in the stock market, charity coffers are overflowing.
FoundationMark recently reported foundation investments reached a record $1.62 trillion at the end of 2024, 15% higher than at 2023’s end.
Even if groups continue giving the same percentage of their income, donation amounts will go up significantly.
It is time for these large independent organizations to start acting independently.
The drumbeat for the philanthropic sector to give more is growing louder.
In this year’s “Meet the Moment” campaign, funders pledge to make up the Trump administration’s cuts to nonprofits.
Led by the Trust-Based Philanthropy Project, it includes heavyweights like the MacArthur Foundation, which upped its giving to 6% of endowment earnings from the legally required 5%.
“We don’t all share the same beliefs or priorities. Neither do our donors or the communities we serve. But as charitable giving institutions we are united behind our First Amendment right to give as an expression of our own distinct values,” the Council on Foundations says.
That’s great news, of course. It shouldn’t have had to come to something as significant as the Trump administration’s cuts for government and philanthropy to put some distance between themselves.
Foundations should stop expecting that their every successful pilot program should be “replicated” with government funds.
Turning every project into a public-private partnership has certainly seemed beneficial for all parties involved, with government having to spend less taxpayer money on certain efforts and private parties getting to help guide public policy.
But there have been many downsides too. From private-led efforts to subsidize electric vehicles to university area-studies departments, agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts and the Environmental Protection Agency have thrown good money after bad.
The disorder foundations have encouraged in our streets against victims like Iryna Zarutska should be the last straw.
James Piereson is a Manhattan Institute senior fellow. Naomi Schaefer Riley is an American Enterprise Institute senior fellow.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
