Trying To Figure Out How Much Of The Government Grants Goes To Left-Wing Causes And Propaganda Francis Menton
Back on February 14, I had a post titled “How Much Of This Has Been Paid For By The U.S. Taxpayer?” The post asked that question about a sample of issues held dear by the Left: migrant caravans, services in the U.S. to illegal aliens, DEI and climate alarm.
Over the intervening weeks it has become clear that the general answer is “a lot of it,” but the details will be slow to emerge. For example, you can go to the website of DOGE and get an endless list of hundreds of contracts and grants that have been reduced or canceled. But they all seem to have legitimate headlines or titles, even if they were wasteful. How much of this money was getting diverted to an NGO, and from there to another NGO and then another until it ended up funding migrant caravans or pro-Palestinian propaganda or some other such cause. There is very little indication.
Certainly, you can count on the biggest left-wing grant recipients to be less than honest in defending their fiefdoms. Consider, for example, Harvard University. It’s been big news the past couple of days that Harvard has refused to knuckle under to President Trump’s demands that it rein in anti-semitism, in order to retain its many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of annual federal funding. Harvard President Alan Garber defended the university’s position in an email addressed to the “Harvard Community” that is publicly available here. Here’s how it starts out:
For three-quarters of a century, the federal government has awarded grants and contracts to Harvard and other universities to help pay for work that, along with investments by the universities themselves, has led to groundbreaking innovations across a wide range of medical, engineering, and scientific fields. These innovations have made countless people in our country and throughout the world healthier and safer. . . . These partnerships are among the most productive and beneficial in American history. New frontiers beckon us with the prospect of life-changing advances—from treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes, to breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, quantum science and engineering, and numerous other areas of possibility. For the government to retreat from these partnerships now risks not only the health and well-being of millions of individuals but also the economic security and vitality of our nation.
It all looks like mis-direction to me. How much of Harvard’s federal funding goes to the widely-supported subjects that Garber lists — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, AI, quantum science and engineering? Clearly a small minority. And how much goes to garbage like, for example, climate alarm? Garber won’t even mention that one, nor will he provide a quantitative breakout of how much federal taxpayer money Harvard sends down that particular rathole. If you wish, you can go to the Harvard website, where you will find an unbelievable profusion of climate alarm initiatives, for example the Harvard University Center for the Environment/Climate, Harvard University Climate Solutions, Harvard Business School Confronting Climate Change, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute Climate Change Initiative, Harvard School of Public Health Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment, etc., etc., etc. There are many more. It is a fair bet that all of these are majority federally funded, and that few if any of them would exist at all without the federal largesse.
More generally, here is an article from Harvard Magazine in 2022 that breaks down the faculty of Harvard’s “Arts & Sciences” divisions between science, humanities and social sciences. (“Arts & Sciences” excludes the professional schools like Law, Medicine and Business.). In round numbers, it’s 40% science and 60% humanities and social sciences. Garber doesn’t even try to defend anything in the majority consisting of humanities and social sciences. A huge percentage of that is America hatred and Marxism. Granted, the humanities and social sciences get far fewer federal grants; but they benefit from the gigantic “overhead” allowances that Harvard has attached to its science and medical grants.
And I haven’t even gotten to Harvard’s tolerance of anti-semitism. On that subject, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Association commented today on X: “Harvard’s fighting the Trump administration harder than it’s ever fought antisemitism.”
On the question of federal funding for the migrant invasion, again nothing yet coming out of DOGE-land enables any kind of overall quantification. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit) has an op-ed in today’s New York Post that compiles some prior Post reporting on the subject. The title is “How Democrats used NGO’s to end-run voters.” Reynolds:
[A]s we’ve learned recently, partly as the result of Department of Government Efficiency digging, many “non-governmental” entities are really just fronts for government activities that Americans would never stand for if Washington attempted them directly. For example, America’s border crisis was funded in large part by President Joe Biden’s government, which sent large sums of money in the form of grants to various NGOs that helped train migrants on how to get to the United States — and how to claim asylum when they arrived.
Most significantly, Reynolds links to this February 1 Post piece reporting that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had terminated some $1.4 billion of funding for 2025 to some 15 UN agencies and 230 (!) NGOs that were involved in some way in providing services to the migrants. That is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg.
A huge and barely-explored question remains, which is how much federal funding finds its way via various NGOs to Democrat-supporting political groups? A tantalizing hint emerged on March 27, when a gun-control group called March for Our Lives suddenly laid off 13 of its 16 paid staffers. March for Our Lives is the group founded by anti-gun activist David Hogg, the same guy who got elected Vice Chair of the DNC on February 1. The stated mission of MFOL is “voter engagement” on the gun control issue. Go to the tax filings of MFOL, and you will not find any disclosures of who the donors are. At a Facebook page called “Donald Trump for President” (I’m not sure that this is a valid Trump page) it is alleged that MFOL suffered a “drastic collapse in donations via ActBlue immediately following Trump’s closure of USAID.” So, was MFOL funded via funds laundered from grants originally coming from USAID? It is certainly a reasonable hypothesis, although at this point I cannot find definitive confirmation. Maybe one of the readers can find that. I do not know of any other reason why funding for an anti-gun group, let alone one so high-profile as MFOL, would suddenly evaporate shortly after Trump’s inauguration. You would think that Trump’s inauguration would be energizing the anti-gun groups, rather than the opposite.
So let’s all be on the lookout for Democrat activist groups seeing their ActBlue or other such funding suddenly disappearing. I highly doubt that MFOL will be the only one.
Comments are closed.
