Taxpayers are funding NGOs’ partisan activism Image By Scott Walter This is a lightly edited excerpt of testimony recently provided to the U.S. House of Representatives’ Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee Delivering on Government Efficiency (DOGE) during the hearing “Public Funds, Private Agendas: NGOs Gone Wild.” Americans are proud of our nonprofit sector, which has long led the world, because they love real charities that actually help people here and abroad. They don’t think of the nonprofit sector as the plaything of billionaires and politicians. Yet all too often, that is the reality of our nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, for two reasons. First, many NGOs – over 35,000 according to one study – receive most of their money from government, not citizens. Second, many NGOs serve the Big Government political agenda that fights to centralize power in Washington for the benefit of the Left’s preferred political party. The Solidarity Center From countless egregious examples, consider the Solidarity Center (officially the “American Center for International Labor Solidarity). This nonprofit child of the country’s largest union federation, the AFL-CIO, is chaired by the AFL-CIO’s president. Solidarity Center doesn’t just boost unions, which are major allies of one U.S. political party. It also champions radical agendas in support of DEI and “climate justice.” It’s suing the current administration because DOGE recommended that Solidarity’s federal funding end. It’s received over $86 million from the federal government since 2008; $61 million of that $86 million was given under President Biden, doubtless encouraged by three Solidarity employees who went into his Labor Department. Solidarity receives 99 percent of its total revenue from American taxpayers and serves the AFL-CIO, which gave 86% of its 2024 political donations to Democrats. Other Labor Department grantees The Solidarity Center is by no means the only Labor Department grantee that deserves scrutiny by this Subcommittee and the Department of Government Efficiency. My Capital Research Center colleague Robert Stilson surveyed recent grants by the Department for our website TheDogeFiles.org and found other grantees of obvious political value to the Biden administration’s policy agenda and re-election campaign. For instance, NextGen Climate America (aka, NextGen Policy) was awarded $6 million in 2024 for apprenticeship programs. This 501(c)(3) “charity” is part of a network of nonprofits and PACs of similar name launched by Democratic megadonor Tom Steyer. After the 2024 election, NextGen’s executive director put out a statement declaring that the group was “incredibly disheartened” by Trump’s victory and that “clearly, this was not the outcome we hoped for.” Instead, he pledged the group would “fight for progressive policy change to address environmental, social, racial, gender, and economic inequities in California through justice-centered legislative advocacy, grassroots partnerships, and democratic civic engagement.” Funding environmentalist political allies I want to note an especially egregious example of an NGO benefiting from significant federal funds and pursuing a radical agenda: the Environmental Law Institute. The Institute has received awards from the Environmental Protection Agency and from the Department of Homeland Security. It operates the controversial Climate Judiciary Project, which seeks to “educate”—from a left-wing perspective—federal and state judges about climate change and related litigation designed to extract billions of dollars from oil and gas companies for alleged climate harms. These trainings attempt to influence the very judges who are hearing these cases, using a curriculum developed in part by individuals assisting with that litigation. The last administration’s largest effort to subsidize its environmentalist allies came via the Inflation Reduction Act, whose centerpiece was the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The current administration is struggling to retrieve at least some of these monies, led by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and I await a forthcoming study of the Fund by my friends at the Foundation for Government Accountability, whose president, Peter Schweizer, declares, “The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund is the most corrupt slush fund in U.S. history.” Read the rest of Walter’s testimony here. Scott Walter is president of the Capital Research Center, an independent, tax-exempt research firm billed as “America’s investigative think tank.” *The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of EnergyPlatform.News.
