‘The Weekly Standard’: a Philanthropy Czar
January 10, 2008 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The next president of the United States — Republican or Democrat — should nominate Sen. Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, to a new White House job of philanthropy czar, writes John J. DiIulio Jr., a University of Pennsylvania scholar, in The Weekly Standard magazine (December 10).
Mr. DiIulio, who served as the first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush, writes that the role he has in mind would be very different from the one he held. The sole responsibility would be “to report objectively on how the nation’s massive nonprofit sector serves the public interest (or not) and to recommend legislative and other reforms to improve the sector’s self-governance and call it to public account the way the government once called for-profit corporations to public account.”
While he applauds Mr. Grassley for his efforts to propose “myriad reforms to help ensure that nonprofit organizations put charitable good works before outsized perks,” he says the biggest problems with the nonprofit world today are not just examples of greed or corruption.
“The fundamental problem is that government routinely confers diverse public subsidies on nonprofit organizations that follow the law’s letter while doing only incidental things to benefit their communities or the public at large.”
He urges lawmakers to restrict full tax-exempt status to organizations that take significant action to help the disadvantaged.
“Ask not what nonprofit organizations do for their employees or members,” he writes. “Ask instead what they do for their local communities and for their country. Ask how much, all sanctimonious or self-serving rhetoric aside, they dedicate in money, manpower, building space, or other resources to producing these benefits. Some well-endowed private universities will come out looking great and deserving almost every break in the book; others will come out looking … well-endowed.”
He added: “Tax-exempt for what and for whom — those are fundamental questions to begin asking in earnest and they will rapidly take us well beyond concerns about the nonprofit sector’s vulnerability to gross mismanagement, ethical lapses, dirty deeds, or felonious actions.”
The article is available online.
