January 25, 2007 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Nonprofit organizations are scrambling for charitable dollars because recent experience has taught them not to depend on government money to solve public problems. It seems the money just isn’t there. Or is it?
Government does manage to finance what it wants to do, but sometimes with trade-offs. Regardless of the views nonprofit leaders have about the war in Iraq and how it has been waged, one thing is clear to people on all sides: The costs of the war have propelled government-spending cuts that affect millions of Americans and the nonprofit organizations that serve them.
Even while handing out more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, the Republican-controlled Congress approved enough extra spending for the Iraq war to have paid for about 50 years of Head Start for each of the million or so kids enrolled in that program. Those same dollars could have covered about 16 years of medical insurance for every needy child in the United States or paid four-year state tuition for every undergraduate at every college and university in America — and still have had a bit left over to send some on to graduate school.
In fact, federal spending on the war could have financed enough new public housing to accommodate every homeless American in permanent residences and even provided some with vacation homes. But that’s not what President Bush asked for, and not what Congress gave him. The reality is that in education, housing, nutrition, and other areas, federal aid to nonprofit groups that provide services was cut — so organizations had to do more with less in the face of growing need — while government money went to war.
Instead of doing good, the money was used to finance a war that has cost more than 3,000 American lives, wounded more than 22,000 other American men and women, and resulted in the deaths of between 52,000 and 600,000 Iraqis — the larger estimate is made by Johns Hopkins University scholars after careful study. Congress has already appropriated more than $350-billion for that war beyond regular military budgets, and costs are projected to total more than a trillion dollars when continuing care for the wounded is counted.
This isn’t like the first gulf war, where costs were shared by a large number of nations. The United States is footing the entire bill for this one and will be paying it, quite literally, for generations to come.
Charities have been reluctant to speak about those important public-policy issues and the need for more aid to go to domestic causes instead of the war, and foundations have shied away from such advocacy. But they should realize that speaking out today does not mean getting involved in partisan politics. The war has little popular support and massive opposition — and a very broad swath of Americans has been affected by its financial and human costs. Perhaps it would be wise if nonprofit groups that see themselves as leaders in their communities and in society listened to their followers and caught up with their views.
Not only has domestic federal aid failed to keep up with growing need, but since the war began in 2003, cuts have been made in more than half of the 72 federal direct-service programs tracked by the Coalition on Human Needs, a Washington group that advocates for federal policies to aid the poor. Most of the cuts went deeper than 10 percent after inflation. Federal programs that help young people, support community services, and provide mental-health services, substance-abuse prevention, child and health care, and food to the elderly are among the hardest hit.
Even more disturbing, in the last session of Congress, House and Senate appropriation committees recommended that 55 to 62 of those programs should be cut further, some by as much as an additional 25 percent in the government’s 2007 fiscal year.
Those government programs provide the money that nonprofit groups use to supply services to needy and moderate-income people, the very people who are losing ground in today’s economy as the real value of salaries and wages decline.
The federal aid at issue should not be considered subsidies to charities — they finance programs through which government enlists nonprofit groups to tend to public problems and to advance the common good. And simply as a function of scale, there is absolutely no way that private philanthropy, even given increased American altruism, can provide an adequate substitute for government aid.
The war has had other undeniable direct costs for those immediately involved. Beyond the horrors and hardships faced by many of the wounded, the trauma and stress carried by tens of thousands of others will continue to affect the quality of their lives and the lives of those who love them.
Nearly two-thirds of the “weekend soldiers” in the National Guard — more than 200,000 men and women with civilian lives — have been called up to assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and had their family, work, and community lives disrupted; some may even be recalled for the new surge. Active-duty military personnel have faced the family upheaval of multiple rotations through Iraq, and may yet face more. And while nonprofit groups have sprung up to deal with these issues, how will they get the resources they need to do the job?
The United States is paying a terrible price for the war. Americans are less safe at home and abroad, and more isolated in the world as a nation, as a people, and as individuals. Our enemies have grown in number, conviction, determination, and ferocity. Erosion in our own rights and liberties seem to some a required trade-off for greater security. Many Americans, as well as people around the world, feel that our government and international institutions have lost moral authority, legitimacy, and effectiveness.
Even trivial pocketbook issues remind us daily that we cannot personally escape the toll of this evil, even if we think Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo have nothing to do with us. The war has cut Iraqi oil production and made it much more costly to fill up the gas tank here at home. That also has sent thousands of people to seek aid from charities for their fuel costs and growing money woes, and made it even harder for organizations and volunteers to do their work for charitable causes.
Shouldn’t the nonprofit world have said something about all of this in the last few years? Shouldn’t charities say something now?
Charities have moved from running bake sales to creating bakeries to finance their programs — and while that has allowed some organizations to serve more people, in the process too many groups have given up demanding that government meet its responsibilities to do good with the money provided by taxpayers
The nonprofit world is grounded in a sense of humanity, which means we also have a responsibility to be outraged when vulnerable people are suffering and when government policy creates or exacerbates misery. Today, silence is an abdication in the face of an abomination. Charities need to speak up and urge Congress to get Washington’s foreign policy and its financial priorities in order.
Mark Rosenman works in Washington as a public-service professor at Union Institute & University, which has its headquarters in Cincinnati.
