The NGO Scandal You're Not Hearing About

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Go to https://ground.news/doge to stay fully informed on what’s happening on all things DOGE. Subscribe through my link to get 40% off unlimited access on the Vantage Plan and take control of the news you consume.  ------------------------------------------------  There’s a massive web of NGOs, think tanks, and "democracy-building" organizations using your dollars for their gain. These groups have twisted the word “democracy” to mean themselves. Here's how!  ----------------------------------------------- 🔗 Stay updated with DOGE Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLV5X47OmZs2u2r7gBfS_vCEplmii48p_2  -----  🎁 GET YOUR MERCH HERE: https://shop.nickjfreitas.com/  🤝 BECOME A MEMBER OF THE IC: https://NickJFreitas.com  Instagram: www.instagram.com/nickjfreitas/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/NickFreitasVA Twitter: https://twitter.com/NickJFreitas YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Nickjfreitas TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickfreitas3.0

Transcript

00:00Hello and welcome back to Doge Watch, where if you give us just a couple minutes of your time,

00:03we will tell you everything that Doge has been up to. I am your host, Nick Freitas. Well,

00:07if you've been watching this program for more than 27 seconds, you realize that we have a bit

00:11of a nonprofit problem in this country. And by that, I mean, we have a ton of left-wing

00:15nonprofits that have been cashing in on our tax dollars. And thanks to Doge,

00:20we now have a pretty good understanding of how that's been working, where it's been working,

00:24and how much of our money has actually been wasted. Now, the Trump administration has

00:27responded very quickly and effectively to this by freezing those funds. But just like we discussed

00:32in our last episode, the Supreme Court can step in or other courts can step in, pass an injunction,

00:38and the next thing you know, those funds now have to get wasted despite what the administration

00:44might want or the American people might want, which begs the question, if Congress is the one

00:48that allocated these funds, why? And why can't we, with a new Congress, stop those funds from

00:54being allocated in ways that the vast majority of the country agrees are wasteful? And this is

01:00where we get into the problem of not just nonprofits, but also NGOs. So what is an NGO

01:07and how does it differ from a nonprofit? So an NGO is very simply a non-government organization.

01:12But unlike a nonprofit, an NGO really isn't a legal description. It's more of a general

01:18description of the kind of work that they do. So for instance, a nonprofit often refers to

01:23specific legal status in many countries where the organization is recognized as not distributing

01:29profits to owners or shareholders. In the U.S., for instance, nonprofits can apply for tax-exempt

01:35status under IRS codes like a 501c3. So that's a nonprofit, right? So what's an NGO? The term

01:42NGO isn't a legal designation in most countries, but rather a descriptive label. An organization

01:47called an NGO might be registered as a nonprofit, charity, or another legal entity, depending on the

01:53country's laws. So here's the thing that we really need to understand about NGOs and why this is the

01:58scandal that we're not talking enough about yet. An NGO is a specific type of organization that

02:03operates independently from government control and typically focuses on social, political,

02:10environmental, or humanitarian issues at a national or international level.

02:17NGOs have been actually organized sometimes by the government or propped up by the government

02:23in order to carry out objectives of the government, but apart from direct government control. And this

02:29is where we go over to our friends at Ground News. One of the benefits I like of Ground News,

02:33whenever I'm researching or preparing for this or other programs, is it gives me the opportunity to

02:38be able to type in simple search engines, and then it comes back with a host of curated news

02:44articles. So you can see right now, just by typing in Doge and State Department, I get this main

02:48headline, Rubio says Trump administration canceling 83% of programs at USAID and intends to move

02:54remaining ones to the State Department. So there's two major issues there, right? The cutting of funds

02:59and taking existing funds and putting it under the leadership of the State Department. So I get to go

03:03through this, and not only do I get to see which news agencies are actually covering this story

03:08and where their potential biases are, I get a link to all of the stories from the different

03:12news agencies that take me directly to their pages so I can read in and dive in even deeper.

03:17But the thing I probably like the most about this is that right here, up top, underneath the

03:22headline, you see left, center, right. What this does is it gives me a synopsis of what various

03:29news agencies are emphasizing about their reporting from the left's perspective, the center's

03:34perspective, and the right's perspective. So if like us, you are somewhat frustrated with the way

03:39that typical search engines curate the news to where you only get one perspective, go over to

03:44ground.news slash doge and check out all of the different features that they provide. In fact,

03:50if you go there right now, ground.news slash doge, you can get 40% off of their vantage plan,

03:57which is going to give you access to all of the features that you need to be able to keep track

04:01of what is going on. What does this mean? Why is this important that they're moving all of

04:05these programs from USAID under the direct purview of the State Department? Well, it's because of two

04:11reasons. One, we're going to get a lot more direct and consistent oversight, right? Because a lot of

04:16these NGOs might have oversight from Congress because Congress is the one that allocates the

04:21funds, but we're going to get into a little bit later on why that oversight might not make as

04:24much sense as we think it does. But by moving it under the administration, you get two things. One,

04:29direct oversight from the President's appointment to the Secretary of State,

04:34and you get consistency in messaging or operations, at least you should, because now you have this

04:40kind of unified command. I mean, if U.S. foreign policy is supposed to be consistent in their

04:45messaging and their objectives, then why would you have all these different organizations that

04:49you're funding potentially going out and doing stuff with little to no oversight that could be

04:53contradicting what your administration wants to do? And that gets us to our next point.

04:59Data Republican, who if you're not following in X, I highly encourage it. She does incredible work.

05:03Data Republican recently put this out. She goes, for new followers, here is a diagram illustrating

05:08how core NGOs collaborate to create a global soft power structure that shapes elections,

05:14public policy, economic policy, and media influence. That one's important because we're

05:19going to get to that again. I'm going to click on this right now because I want to go over this

05:22graph that she shared because I like graphs. So right here, we have the National Endowment for

05:26Democracy and the Consortium for Elections and Political Process Strengthening. But the thing

05:31we're going to focus on specifically is the National Endowment for Democracy or NED. So

05:36underneath this, you need to understand these are funding vehicles. So money gets allocated from

05:41Congress to the State Department or USAID. USAID funnels it into these funding mechanisms,

05:46and then it goes into these other organizations that actually carry out the work. So the Center

05:51for International Private Enterprise, which is supposed to be more free market oriented.

05:55Then you have the Solidarity Center, which is more public sector and private union affiliated,

06:00which again, seems a little strange. I promise you, we'll get to it. Then you have the International

06:05Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute. So the Republican Party and the

06:09Democratic Party. Then you have the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, which is

06:13supposed to ensure technology, training, and oversight for fair, transparent, and open elections.

06:19Then you have this thing called Internews, which is there to promote pro-democracy media.

06:25Why do all these organizations exist? Why did the government essentially prop up and fund? Because

06:30they do. The US government, your tax dollars almost completely fund all these organizations.

06:35Why are they there? Well, for that, we're going to go to this article from the New Criterion.

06:40Here's what James Pearson writes on this. The NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, as I wrote

06:47for the New Criterion on December 3rd, was established in 1983 as a Cold War operation in

06:52order, in President Reagan's words, to foster the infrastructure of democracy, the system of a free

06:58press, unions, political parties, universities. Most of the NED's funds in that era flowed to

07:04dissident groups in Soviet controlled countries in Eastern Europe or to anti-communist organizations

07:08operating elsewhere. Alan Weinstein, a noted historian and one of the founders of the NED

07:13said in 1991, a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.

07:21Why were they established? They were established to achieve foreign influence. That's what it was.

07:27It was a mechanism to go into the Soviet Union or countries that were being influenced by the

07:31Soviet Union and provide counter-influence. The Soviets wanted to preach communism.

07:36We wanted to preach free markets along, I guess, with public sector employee unions.

07:41Right? The Soviet Union had different objectives and things that they wanted to give out to these

07:46countries in order to foster dissident groups. We did the same things with dissident groups that

07:50we thought would be more friendly to the United States. Now, at a time, at the height of the Cold

07:54War, in the 80s, you might be able to look at some of this and be like, okay, that makes sense

07:58because there seems to be a clear objective and there seems to be a very, very clear enemy in

08:02place that we're working against. The problem is, is what happens after that enemy goes away?

08:08Well, now this organization doesn't want to leave, right? It doesn't want to disband.

08:11There's all this money coming in. There's all these jobs associated with it. There's other

08:15ways that the United States government can influence other countries or groups in order

08:19to promote democracy. What we find as you go through the article is that their version of

08:23promoting democracy looks a lot like the way Democrats talk about democracy in this country.

08:28Democracy is whatever the left says it is. Anything that disagrees with the left's ideology

08:34ends up becoming a threat to democracy. All of a sudden, you see organizations,

08:40non-governmental organizations that don't have direct control or even really direct oversight,

08:46going out and spending billions in US tax dollars in order to push ideological objectives.

08:54Now, you might be saying, what do you mean no oversight, Nick? Well, okay, technically,

08:58Congress had oversight. The way these organizations were first set up was some of them were more

09:04heavily influenced by Republicans and other were more heavily influenced by Democrats for the idea

09:08of not trying to push one partisan agenda, but rather a more unified concept of what Americans

09:13consider to be healthy for democracy. But that's not what's going on anymore. That's what DOJ has

09:19uncovered. The next step in this, and one of the things that Data Republican points out,

09:23is that these NGOs are not only almost entirely funded by your tax dollars, but they also,

09:31interestingly enough, end up getting staffed by either current or former members of Congress

09:37or the executive branch. What do you have? You have a bunch of political staffers. You have a

09:42bunch of people that were in the position to influence the amount of funds, where they went,

09:47how they were spent, going to nonprofits and NGOs that they end up working for later.

09:54Let's face it. If you're a member of Congress, you get paid pretty well, but you're not getting

09:59rich off of that paycheck. But if you're now in a position where you can influence

10:04billions of dollars worth of funding, not just to the private sector, but to non-governmental

10:11organizations that get to operate pretty much with impunity, who more than likely would love to have

10:16you sit on their board or occupy one of their positions just as soon as you finish your

10:21government service, don't you see where there might be a problem right now with respect to

10:26perverse incentives for the people allocating this money or pushing this agenda? One of the

10:31things that we're seeing right now, one of the reasons why they're trying to push so much of

10:35this under the control of the State Department is not because the State Department is necessarily

10:39going to get it right all the time, not because it's going to run flawlessly, but at least then

10:43we'll know where the money's going and we'll know who to blame if they misallocate it.

10:48One of the most important things that we can focus on right now, one of the issues that

10:53Doge is really going to have to lean into is we're going to have to start asking ourselves,

10:56why do we have all of these NGOs? Look, maybe there will be some practical uses for them.

11:02I'm the sort of person that I don't want to expand government, so maybe there's use cases

11:08where the government outsourcing a particular responsibility to a private sector entity might

11:13be more appropriate, but there's no question that these NGOs, which are almost exclusively

11:18funded by government, have perverse incentives. In fact, that's why you have people like Senator

11:24Mike Lee, who said the non-government and NGO should mean no government funding.

11:29Thomas Massey said Congress and Doge should obliterate grants that claim to combat mis,

11:33dis, or misinformation. These Orwellian terms identify government censorship.

11:38Americans shouldn't be funding government efforts to deprive them of their own right to speak

11:42freely. This is a good point because with many of the nonprofits, they were doing things like

11:47that in the United States. With a lot of these NGOs, they were doing it overseas. In many cases,

11:51they were doing it overseas to countries that they had identified as a threat to democracy

11:56based on things like nationalist tendencies or populism. Just out of curiosity,

12:02what are some of the accusations thrown at Trump? Well, that he's a nationalist,

12:07that he's a populist. You see, that's dangerous to democracy. No, it can be,

12:13just like other things can be dangerous to a democratic system or a system based off of the

12:17rule of law. But you know what's also dangerous? Taking billions of dollars in taxpayer funds,

12:23allocating to these NGOs, operating independently from government with very little oversight,

12:27to be able to go out there and manipulate things in other countries, ostensibly in the name

12:33of spreading US foreign policy and US values, when in reality, there's a huge difference of

12:38opinion on what American values actually constitute. One of the things that's become

12:42abundantly clear is that the left in this country has a very different view of American values than

12:48the rest of us. Most of us don't see billions of dollars in funding to push DEI or LGBTQ things

12:56across the world as the advancement of American values, but the left does. They don't see any

13:01problem with it. There's no contradiction to them. Of course, this is the way that you would

13:05spend money in order to influence and carry out US foreign policy. One of the most important

13:11things that all of us can do right now as we're supporting DOJ is recognize that as much as I

13:18accuse the left on participating in this sort of process, and as much as I still believe that it

13:24predominantly is used to benefit the left and their objectives, that doesn't mean elements of the right

13:30have not also been involved. This is the part where we talk about the uniparty, because the

13:35uniparty does exist. It's not that all Republicans and all Democrats are exactly the same. That is

13:40clearly verifiably false. But there are elements within government that have gotten very, very cozy

13:47with the bureaucracy, the status quo, and their ability to fund it and take care of it while

13:52they're in office, so those same institutions are right there with a really cushy job for them as

13:57soon as they leave government service. One of the things that we're going to have to recognize

14:02is that when we're trying to cut back on a lot of this wasteful spending, when we're trying to cut

14:06back on a lot of these programs, NGOs, nonprofits, or systems that have been put in place, we're going

14:11to need to be watching Congress very, very closely, because there will be a thousand excuses for why,

14:17okay, we need to stop the wasteful spending, but this organization, this entity needs to still

14:22exist. Maybe at times that's true, but there's going to be a lot of times where it's not.

14:25One of my favorite Elon Musk quotes is, don't make something that shouldn't exist more efficient.

14:32One of the primary objectives of DOJ is going to have to be not just finding wasteful spending,

14:36but asking the deeper question of how is that wasteful spending allowed to continue,

14:41and if we need to cut not only the spending, but the organization responsible for spending it,

14:45then that's what we need to do, because if you get rid of the spending now, but you leave the

14:49organization intact, one that shouldn't exist, I guarantee you they will be back in four years,

14:54and six years, and eight years advocating before a different Congress, or a different president,

15:00or a different state department, and the funds will go right back into it,

15:03because a lot of what this comes down to, a lot of what this comes down to

15:07is the left finding a bureaucracy that we all thought was neutral,

15:13gaining ideological capture of it, and then using it to put money into their preferred

15:18organizations for their preferred purposes, regardless of who the people elected.

15:23That has to end, and if DOJ is serious about doing it, they're going to have to advocate

15:27not only for cuts, but the removal of certain organizations, and I think DOJ has been pretty

15:32faithful in that. I think the president has been faithful in that. What remains to be seen

15:37is whether Congress will be faithful to that purpose. We will be having several interviews

15:42with members of Congress over the next couple of weeks, and that is one of the primary questions

15:46we're going to be asking in some of our additional bonus episodes that we're going to be providing

15:50for you here on DOJ Watch. Once again, thank you for joining us. Please like and subscribe,

15:55and we'll see you next time.

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