Opinion: Charities Are Increasingly an Arm of Big Government

An explosion of federal spending on grants to charities, hospitals, research institutions, and advocacy groups has “turned much of the not-for-profit sector into a junior partner in administering the welfare state,” according to a Wall Street Journal opinion column.

James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and president of the William E. Simon Foundation, writes that in the last 50 years the U.S. budget has increased far faster than the size of the federal workforce because the government “subcontracts so many of its functions to ostensibly private institutions.”

Many of those organizations in turn lobby in Washington for increased federal spending and tax hikes and against limiting tax breaks for giving, Mr. Piereson writes. “The cozy relationship between nonprofits and the government should make us question the value of the charitable deduction in an era of expanding government,” he says.