…a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!
By tradition, American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are our civil society backbone, where private money provides great things without government interference. Soup kitchens, animal shelters, schools, and churches are some of the many examples.
But many NGOs are really BGOs—“basically governmental organizations” —some with missions that don’t fit into this civil society reputation.
EcoHealth
For example, over a 10-year period through June 2023, the EcoHealth Alliance reported receiving a cumulative total of $115.7 million from “government grants.” This was 85.9 percent of this supposed NGO’s total funding for the decade.
EcoHealth was really a BGO, and its financing model was as common as it is confusing. In February, researchers from Candid reported that at least 35,000 separate nonprofits were receiving at least half of their total revenue from federal taxpayers.
Overall, according to Candid, taxpayer financing provides $303 billion annually for more than 100,000 NGOs. That averages out to almost $900 spent for each American drawing a breath, or $3,600 per year for each household of four.
What the EcoHealth Alliance has done with its federal payments became a controversial mystery.
In May 2024 congressional hearings, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers criticized EcoHealth and Peter Daszak, its former president, for allegedly mismanaging and misrepresenting its corona virus research work with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Some Republicans have publicly speculated that EcoHealth’s grants to WIV assisted risky gain-of-function research that may have escaped from the lab.
In May 2024, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services announced it was planning to hand down a rare, five-year ban on federal grants going to EcoHealth. According to the journal Science, EcoHealth Alliance fired Daszak on January 6, 2025. The federal prohibition against funding for EcoHealth and Daszak was formalized on January 17, during the waning days of the Biden administration.
Despite the outsized trouble it got into with the money, EcoHealth is far from the biggest of the BGOs or the only controversial recipient. Its annual, mostly taxpayer-funded budget has never exceeded $20 million.
Other BGOs
Power Forward Communities is a perfect example of a giant BGO in the making. The lefty nonprofit’s first (and so far only) publicly available IRS filing, covering the period through December 2023, shows total receipts of just $100.
Yes, that’s not a typo. They reported not quite enough money to gas up a large pickup truck.
But in March 2024, Power Forward received its tax exemption from the IRS. The following month this brand-new tiny nonprofit was set up to become a great big BGO when it received a $2 billion grant award from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through its Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).
Similarly, the Coalition for Green Capital filed its first IRS report in 2014 and through December 2023 reported a cumulative total revenue of just $16.8 million, for an average of less than $1.7 million annually. But in April 2024, this small NGO was ready for a promotion to big-time BGO when it too received a $5 billion grant award from the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
The GGRF was funded through the badly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. GGRF’s $20 billion carbon war treasure chest was supposed to assist LIDACs—“low-income and disadvantaged communities” upgrade for so-called green energy.
If helping the poor were the real objective, then the GGRF pile of loot could have provided a $540 check for every American citizen living below the poverty line—a $2,100 windfall for a low-income family of four. Instead, the money was divided among just eight initial recipients, including Power Forward and the Coalition for Green Capital.
But GGRF funding was still in escrow accounts at financial firms such as Citibank and not yet disbursed when the Trump administration arrived. So in March 2025, new EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced he was cancelling and demanding the return of all $20 billion:
I have taken action to terminate these grants riddled with self-dealing and wasteful spending. EPA will be an exceptional steward of taxpayer dollars dedicated to our core mission of protecting human health and the environment, not a frivolous spender in the name of “climate equity.”
An EPA news release announcing Zeldin had asked the EPA’s inspector general to investigate the GGRF program also called out the Power Forward grant:
For example, [Power Forward Communities] reported just $100 in revenue in 2023, was chosen to receive $2 billion—that’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue. To highlight just how unqualified this organization was, the grant agreement provided 90 days to complete “How to Develop a Budget” training even though the organization was instructed to start spending down the balance in the first 21 days of that timeframe.
The BGOs Grab Back
But BGOs can be as shameless about their government largesse as they are dependent on it. Both Power Forward Communities and the Coalition for Green Capital immediately sued to prevent Zeldin from clawing back their funding and swiftly won a temporary restraining order from an Obama-appointed federal judge.
In response, Zeldin pledged his EPA “will not rest until these hard-earned taxpayer dollars are returned to the U.S. Treasury.”
The taxpayers generally expect their “hard-earned” tax dollars to be spent for unobjectionable causes. For example, preventing pandemics (rather than allegedly contributing to them) was certainly the intent of the federal grants sent to the EcoHealth Alliance.
As these spending controversies demonstrate, our BGOs too often have basic accountability problems. And even after those concerns are exposed, it can be very hard to get the money back.
