NGOs are often BGOs—Basically Governmental Organizations

Ideally, we hope they'll be private initiative, civil society ventures. But at least 35,000 separate nonprofits get at least half of their total revenue from federal taxpayers.

…a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!

—Ronald Reagan

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By tradition, American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are our civil society backbone, where private money provides great things without government interference. Soup kitchens, animal shelters, schools, and churches are some of the many examples.

But many NGOs are really BGOs—“basically governmental organizations” —some with missions that don’t fit into this civil society reputation.

EcoHealth

For example, over a 10-year period through June 2023, the EcoHealth Alliance reported receiving a cumulative total of $115.7 million from “government grants.” This was 85.9 percent of this supposed NGO’s total funding for the decade.

EcoHealth was really a BGO, and its financing model was as common as it is confusing. In February, researchers from Candid reported that at least 35,000 separate nonprofits were receiving at least half of their total revenue from federal taxpayers.

Overall, according to Candid, taxpayer financing provides $303 billion annually for more than 100,000 NGOs. That averages out to almost $900 spent for each American drawing a breath, or $3,600 per year for each household of four.

What the EcoHealth Alliance has done with its federal payments became a controversial mystery.

In May 2024 congressional hearings, both Republican and Democratic lawmakers criticized EcoHealth and Peter Daszak, its former president, for allegedly mismanaging and misrepresenting its corona virus research work with China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Some Republicans have publicly speculated that EcoHealth’s grants to WIV assisted risky gain-of-function research that may have escaped from the lab.

In May 2024, the Biden administration’s Department of Health and Human Services announced it was planning to hand down a rare, five-year ban on federal grants going to EcoHealth. According to the journal Science, EcoHealth Alliance fired Daszak on January 6, 2025. The federal prohibition against funding for EcoHealth and Daszak was formalized on January 17, during the waning days of the Biden administration.

Despite the outsized trouble it got into with the money, EcoHealth is far from the biggest of the BGOs or the only controversial recipient. Its annual, mostly taxpayer-funded budget has never exceeded $20 million.

Other BGOs

Power Forward Communities is a perfect example of a giant BGO in the making. The lefty nonprofit’s first (and so far only) publicly available IRS filing, covering the period through December 2023, shows total receipts of just $100.

Yes, that’s not a typo. They reported not quite enough money to gas up a large pickup truck.

But in March 2024, Power Forward received its tax exemption from the IRS. The following month this brand-new tiny nonprofit was set up to become a great big BGO when it received a $2 billion grant award from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) through its Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).

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