How to Dismantle the NGO Underground

The Trump administration has started the job, but we need bolder action from the White House and Congress to finish it.

“We were reminded from time to time that the communists never give up.” – Lee Kuan Yew, founder of Singapore, From Third World to First

“Salus populi suprema lex esto” [The good of the people should be the supreme law] – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Legibus

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If you want to know why there has been such intense NGO focus in the first months of the new Trump administration, you need only look at the final weeks of the Biden administration. In the final few weeks, some of the largest grants in the history of the United States flew out the door, and into the coffers of some very dubious organizations. It was the last hurrah of a corrupt system. Now, the Trump administration and DOGE have taken a particular interest in exposing and undoing that system.

I’m a huge fan of a lot of the work being done against these insane entities, but on the admin’s current path without the right strategy, Congress will fail and we will be facing this problem again in the 2030s, with hundreds of billions once again propping up the far left. Here’s how to be bold enough to dismantle this nonsense for good.

It would take thousands of pages to enumerate all of the cronyism that exists. So, I’ll be brief and summarize a few of the biggest examples.

Billions of dollars went to a group tied to Stacey Abrams, whose plan was to buy refrigerators and other appliances for citizens, allegedly for environmental purposes. As a private charity, this is dubious, but perhaps donors would be willing to fund it; as a matter of public funding, it’s outrageous. The EPA is now investigating those dollars. As it turns out, the group had only received hundreds of dollars in private donations.

The Free Press reported that $20 billion in a “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund” was “rushed out the door to eight nonprofit groups after Biden lost the election—but before President Donald Trump took office. As one former EPA official put it on a secretly recorded video, it was akin to ‘tossing gold bars off the Titanic.’”

“The eight groups were allocated sums ranging from $400 million to $6.9 billion. Several of them were formed in August of 2023, just one month after the grant applications went live in July of 2023, when it became clear that large nine- and 10-figure grants would be up for grabs.”

Many NGOs work to subvert border enforcement. Sen. Chuck Schumer has requested funds to be directed to a group under congressional investigation for coaching illegal aliens in how to avoid immigration enforcement agents.

NGOs became a favorite organ of the left to outsource state power and billions of dollars to their own personal projects; they are, by nature, less accountable, and can be totally controlled by ideologues. They can persist through administrations of different parties. And over the course of the last few generations, the left has built a large network of such organizations, and used our money to fund them, putting the irony of the “non-governmental” label front and center. DOGE has helped the public to see that these organizations are extremely political, and that we were all forced to fund them. They range from the “small and ridiculous” to the “massive and corrosive.” Speaking of corrosive: WikiLeaks exposed the Internews Network, which was funded by USAID:

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives.

The operation claims “offices” in over 30 countries, including main offices in US, London, Paris and regional HQs in Kiev, Bangkok and Nairobi. It is headed up by Jeanne Bourgault, who pays herself $451k a year. Bourgault worked out of the US embassy in Moscow during the early 1990s, where she was in charge of a $250m budget, and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times, before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to IN.”

In 2025, we’ve uncovered the world of schemes the left built inside and underneath our republic via the NGOs. Scores exist to facilitate illegal migration across our borders. NGOs run the disastrous, fraudulent homeless programs in our major cities. Hundreds of NGOs exist to prop up Islamist political movements in the US. NGOs work to censor Americans by cracking down on “disinformation.” They push for prison breaks. All with government support!

By winning the election, President Trump halted the continued easy consolidation of power and grift by the left and NGOs. But decades-long slides aren’t reversed in a few months. Countering a continuous revolution requires continuous vigilance. And unfortunately, the left has been able to rely on a conservative movement that doesn’t fight back too hard. Will that change? It must. 

Asking Nicely 

The NGOs are a perfect area for the right to fight — as good as we could ask for. And it’s because the fix is so simple that if the left rejects it, everyone can understand what’s really going on. Under our “asking nicely” framework, federal grant‐making would rest on four mutually reinforcing rules.

1. Complete financial transparency: every agency keeps a public site that lists each active grant, its value, the prime recipient, quarterly spending and performance reports, any final evaluation, and a continuously updated ledger of all payments downstream

2. Uniform reporting: prime recipients and their sub-recipients file the same brief, quarterly template—machine-readable through an OMB tool—that captures total outlays, administrative overhead, direct-service costs, large-expense back-up, and every payment to lower-tier partners. Standard fields let analysts compare grants across programs and flag anomalies automatically.

3. Independent oversight: agencies monitor compliance in real time, while Inspectors General and the GAO pick random grants for deep audits each year and publish their findings. OMB coordinates five-year reviews of every grant program, forcing an explicit decision to continue, modify, or end each one based on evidence.

4. Integrity safeguards: executives and board members must certify they have no recent federal-grant conflicts, no leadership role in a violating organisation within five years, and no convictions for bribery, fraud, or similar crimes. Any disqualified leader blocks further funding until removed. Grant money may never finance voter-registration or get-out-the-vote work; a single violation terminates all related awards and bars the responsible organisation from federal funds for five years.

At present, nobody thinks you could get 60 Senate votes for this. Given that this is the modest proposal, if it can’t be agreed on, then we’re left with no choice: fight on their terms. 

Raise the stakes. Play the game, and use our control of the government to put tens of billions of dollars into NGOs that reflect our values and that will fight for civilization. Only then will a mutually-agreeable solution become fully realizable.

Why is the United States funding interference in the political affairs of Hungary, a European Union and NATO ally? If the left doesn’t agree to turn that off, maybe the right will propose funding its own NGOs to harass censorious western European governments.

Why not propose to fund organizations that expose poor left-wing governance — be it radical district attorneys, or state legislatures, or bureaucracies. Why not have NGOs to make sure school districts teach patriotism? Today, the NGOs being federally funded go after conservative institutions.

If the left won’t agree to defund anti-civilization “degrowth” environmental NGOs, we raise the stakes and fund pro-progress, pro-energy NGOs. We fight on the same level they fight. No unilateral disarmament.

If we want to turn off the NGOs by consensus, we have to raise the stakes and show the left we can play the game, too. Some may consider it unprincipled. But our principle would actually be winning!

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Principled Warriors, or Principled Losers?

There is a tendency on parts of the American right to believe that it is better to lose while standing on principle than to be seen as winning while being too aggressive or unprincipled. The classics tell us that Temperance is a virtue; but so is Courage. 

Principle is important, and historically our society has been held together by a large number of people across politics adhering to certain principles. But sometimes there is a specific need for a fighting spirit in order to protect principles when they are under threat; and in those times, there is a danger in conflating “having principles” with being totally unwilling to fight. The hard left relies on this; careful, inoffensive Republicans are their “helpful shadow.”

In the extreme, the worship of “norms” can become a betrayal of principles. The question for us is: Do we want to be principled warriors, or are we satisfied being principled losers? 

Across the board, conservative leaders need to act like we are actually in a war for our Republic; many of them still act like we’re out to a picnic, and that a little reshuffling here and there is the way forward. But if we agree it’s a war, the necessary actions in Congress and elsewhere become obvious. Today, too many Republicans in the States act like freedom of speech demands that they funnel billions of dollars into programs that are essentially communist and designed to undermine American values.

There is a reason why both Texas and California fund far-left academic programs, but California would never fund right-wing academic programs. At the University of Texas and nearly every public university, there are hundreds of classes that indoctrinate students to hate markets and our system of government.  As a Texan who used to be a Californian, I can say very clearly: we have to step up and fix this.

So, to conservative leaders everywhere: the left has become skilled at the top-down harnessing of resources and power; so, you have to study up. The left uses taxpayer dollars to fund sinecures for insane people; so, you have to be willing to fire that person and deal with a cable news hit about it. The left weaponizes the public purse to fund actively corrosive activity; so, you have to up the ante and actually stop it.The universities are conquered by people who hate you; so, don’t sell your leadership for some football tickets. Fight back, fire administrators, turn off funding to woke nonsense, or even remove entire useless departments conquered by radical ideologues. This can be a time of great reform and greatness in our country — both with the administration in D.C. and throughout the states. But we must be willing to fight.

And to the left: you cannot force taxpayers to fund your insane revolution against said taxpayers. And we as citizens are not forced to justify our opposition, as it is from first principles. What was extreme was to allow this in the first place. Expecting that public spending programs be free from ideological extremism is, on the contrary, quite a modest position. And shutting down the shadow government of NGO schemes should be table stakes.

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In my case (I cannot speak for all on the right) the goal here is not to reinfect public institutions with an extreme right-wing policy. It’s to root out extreme leftism. And unlike those merely opposed to permanent left wing control in principle — but who are unwilling to do what it takes to exercise it — I am against it in practice, and will fight for that.

So: given that we cannot pass the four items above with 60 votes in the US Senate, the only way to fight for it is to harness NGOs ourselves, aggressively, with our own values for our own ends — until enough Democratic legislators scream "uncle!" and let us turn off the nonsense once and for all.

The hard left has a certain conviction that they will win no matter what. This is very useful for them. It allows for continuous revolution. And as stated above, the right has a certain conviction that their principles will be preserved naturally by the institutions they’ve come to trust. But what happens when those institutions are conquered? They won’t save you.

I refuse to let our children and grandchildren live under permanent victory of the left over all of American society. I hope you'll join me as a principled warrior for our republic, versus letting the right continue to act as "principled losers" who don't fight back!