by G. Murphy Donovan (June 2026)
The Justice Department (@TheJusticeDepartment) has finally created a fraud division (@DOJFraudDiv) to sort through a portion of the so-called non-profit or so-called “charity” ghettoes on the federal dole.
We say “portion” because given the size of the hustle, it would be impossible to audit or purge all two million American non-profits in general or even the smaller number (approx 2,000) of US public policy think tanks in particular. We say “dole,” because non-profits, unlike for-profit businesses, are free from municipal, state, and federal taxes—largely free money, free from public scrutiny.
After all, who questions the merits or values of a “charity” or a “public service?”
There are 1.8-1.9 million registered nonprofits in the US with roughly 1.5 million 501(c)(3) public “charities.” These include all types of tax-exempt entities under section 501(c), such as legitimate charities, schools, private foundations, chambers of commerce, fraternal organizations, and more.
While not a separate category, think tanks are mostly public “policy” institutes. Many are 501(c)(3)s, often university-affiliated, so they are included in the overall “nonprofit” or “charity” totals.
Prominent think tanks are concentrated in Washington, DC, California, and New York City, far Left political sinecures in most cases. In America, where you stand is a function of where you sit, demographically speaking.
Indeed, radical power politics on the American Left separate think tanks from the larger non-profit herd.
To be sure, companies like RAND Corporation or Brookings punch way above their weight in three dimensions: federal, state, and municipal—in the opaque, dimly lit, sexually ambiguous, cannabis corridors of urban monocultures.
Let’s face it; if the District of Columbia is a representative example, the vast majority of American urban voters are far left Democrats.
Minnesota and California day care fraud scams now making headlines may just be test cases or fig leafs. Clearly, Somali Moslems and Minnesota Democrats are amateur grifters, small potatoes. Comically so too; as they were exposed by amateur patriots with cell phone cameras long before federal watchdogs chose to recognize the graft they could not ignore.
Non-profit rackets inside the Beltway and in big states like New York and California are mammoth by comparison. Legacy think tanks in Democrat Party urban sinecures like California and Washington, DC have special immunities and political protections.
All of which may explain why so many so-called “charities” and “non-profits” are neither.
Most 501-Cs like Harvard University in Boston, Brookings in Washington DC, RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, and Brennan Center for Justice in New York City are all safely cocooned in liberal, socialist, if not globalist, political monocultures.
The real irony of non-profits is the illusion or fiction that they merit “charity” status. In some cases, the charitable adjective may be justified. For the most part, non-profits are government protected rackets that absorb approximately four trillion tax free dollars collectively per annum.
Non-profits, contrary to what you might think, do not lose money. At the moment, the net surplus runs at $150 billion per annum. Alas, non-profits are net and gross consumers, not creators, of wealth.
Recently, the DOJ charged the Southern Poverty Law Center (a prominent racial hustle supposed to be tracking hate groups) with 11 counts: including wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Prosecutors allege that from 2014–2023, the SPLC secretly funneled over $3 million in donor funds to paid informants affiliated with violent extremist groups (e.g., Ku Klux Klan factions, Aryan Nations, National Socialist Party of America).
In short, the SPLC was funding the very hate groups it claimed to be fighting. In hustler jargon, the SPLC would be called a circle jerk.
The CEO of SPLC collects a salary of $523K per annum from tax free revenues of $130 million most of which go to other in-house apparatchik salaries. The SPLC has an endowment of $750 million tax free dollars.
No wonder then that the number of non-profits has exploded from 32 thousand to 2 million since 1950 in America alone. Arguably, America’s non-profit sector is the biggest and most profitable racket in the country.
Growth rates of non-profits doubles or trebles the growth rate of the US economy itself annually since “mother” RAND made her debut in 1948.
Many think tank executives take in well over seven figures per annum whilst the average true charity CEO only earns $125K per a year.
The CEO at RAND Corporation gets a bigger annual pay check (a million dollars plus per annum) from US tax dollars than the US President, the Secretary of War, and the Chairman of the JCS, combined.
Think about CEO and executive compensation when you entertain thoughts about “non-profits” and think tanks as “charities” or public “services.”
Alas, non-profit reform is similar to the prospect of systemic voting reform in 50 states. Neither political party wants to kick either hornet nest to see how different results might be if voting or charity effectiveness modalities had real or verifiable standards.
The size of any problem is always inversely proportionate to the likelihood of its solution.
The real story behind think tanks is not just the “profit” charade, but who profits where, how much, and at who’s expense. What is the value of think tanks to the average tax payer who ultimately pays the bills?
Realistically, many think tanks are just generous holding pens for connected, albeit unemployed or unemployable academic or political parasites.
And lest there be any doubt about the political orientation of the big players, recall that RAND Corporation was a major shill, in the last half century, for social, “woke,” DEI, and gender studies; those many social experiments funded by E-Ring gladiators at the Pentagon and in the military service departments.
Unfortunately, the “Pete” purge now in progress at Ground Zero may be too little, too late. The Trump reform clock may run out after the next mid-term elections.
Many, this writer included, suspect that RAND and other pronoun purveyors didn’t jump, like the American Medical Association, on the “trans” train just for profit. At the Pentagon, the new pronoun alphabet and associated gender bending shibboleths were probably sold as a form of social justice, a righteous if not seditious fix to pervasive post-Vietnam military recruiting and retention problems.
The Pentagon always flies many flags. Why not, like NATO, fly the freak, feminist, and rainbow gideons too?
Until very recently, the USAF, RAND Corporation, and Pentagon nexus was about to weaponize and deploy shemale warriors. To be clear, transition theology was never really a hard sell at a woke Pentagon where nearly a century of general officers were weaned on, if not promoted, for their DEI politics and political correctness, not for their strategic acumen or victories.
Alas, the War (nee Defense) Department hasn’t had a big strategic win since 1945 and the jury is still out today on Iran and the Levant for the moment.
The USAF was the original sponsor for the RAND Corporation, now a global enterprise papering governments, foreign and domestic, at all levels.
You can argue that much of the pseudo science behind queer, feminist, and “trans” politics at DOD originated in Santa Monica. Besides their many “studies” on such subjects, RAND Corporation was the first federal contractor to have a taxpayer funded LGBTQ etc. “club” at their headquarters in Santa Monica.
To this day, the pronoun grab bag and fictional, if not dystopian, she-males are fixtures in Santa Monica just as “they” are inside the Beltway and in Washington, DC.
Hat tip to Delaware.
Yes, transvestite enthusiasts now have an elected caucus of one in the halls of Congress too. Unfortunately, most concessions to fake men and/or fake women now come at the expense of all real women.
Ironically, in the wake of WW II, RAND was created by the Army Air Corps to study and report on strategic and nuclear issues for a then nascent Air Force. After Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers, and Doctor Strangelove—and under Don Rice’s stewardship—RAND transitioned into a “woke” or social studies cornucopia pedaling papers on any subject that could pass a liberal or Left Coast litmus test.
Trendy academic schlock from think tanks is now currency for generals and partisan apparatchiks on the make, trying to sell “woke” social policy and programs at the Pentagon and in the military.
Note also that influencer venues that feature think tank “experts” are usually partisan platforms like BBC, PBS, NPR, and the usual suspects at most American legacy news networks. Any politician or reporter who seeks to give a social program some academic or “scientific” gloss can depend on a think tank “study,” or survey, festooned with foregone conclusions—at taxpayer expense.
Think tank “science” is deductive; begun with an agenda, draped with select data, and polished in an unreadable pamphlet citing agreeable sources.
Think tank “studies” have little or no independent peer review because their ephemeron, like gender and transition theology, is not real study nor is it science.
Samantha Powers, former czarina at USAID, in a rare moment of candor, labeled the phenomenon “empathy advocacy.”
To be fair, political geography is probably a big player too. RAND Corporation remains in Santa Monica for many of the same reasons that Elon Musk and X (nee Twitter) left California.
RAND might be a victim of institutional entropy too, that phenomenon where institutions begat with the best of intentions, over time, become the enemy of the original ideal.
Here you might think about the sad fate of all those Ivy League school houses; founded to educate Christian clerics, now playing host to: battalions of entitled brats, Moslem fanatics, liberal fascists, sex fetishists, and genocidal anti-Semites.
Think too about extinction eschatology (hat tip to AI), if you will; the possibility that a large angry, predatory XY transvestite sailor might be, as we speak, be sailing on an American nuclear submarine captained by a woke, like minded, US Naval Academy graduate.
Political correctness, in matters strategic, is the very definition of national, if not global, suicidal empathy. (Hat tip to Gad Saad and his excellent read, Suicidal Empathy, on the same subject.)
You might surmise, if you’re an optimist, that the non-profit or think tank sectors are just minor players in the larger international econo/political tableau.
Think again.
Think tanks serve as sinecures for politicians of all political stripes here and abroad, bull pens or cow pastures for out-of-office professionals and partisan political apparatchiks.
Policy portals are now the global revolving doors of unelected power. Indeed, RAND is just one of too many obvious partisan or utopian institutional examples nursing on the tax-free teat.
Again, to be fair, non-profit policy wizards were not always a bad idea.
Academics like Bernard Brodie, Herman Kahn, and Roberta Wholstetter were the early prophets of the early nuclear age back when RAND was a critical mass of strategic superstars. Indeed, a Herman Kahn talk at the Pentagon auditorium back in the day was a standing room only event for educating the Pentagon brass.
Lesser luminaries now haunt the halls of power at home and in Europe.
When Don Rice decamped as CEO in Santa Monica, he became Secretary of the Air Force. Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of the board at RAND when he was between tours as Secretary of Defense. More recently, Rose Gottemoeller, another RAND alumnus, served as Under Secretary of State and eventually as Deputy Secretary General of NATO.
The reach of think tank veterans is national and global, if not unelected utopian. The old metaphor of “revolving door” is inadequate to describe today’s phenomena where the same players consort with each other in what is now an international, utopian, socialist, if not Islamist merry-go-round.
The indispensable study that we may never see from RAND, the Atlantic Council, or the Intelligence Community for that matter, is an assessment of the merger of the Islamic Right and the Socialist Left in Europe, a threat that strikes at the very heart of the European Union and NATO, if not global stasis.
Indeed, the Islamic jihad and Chicom imperialism, fueled by Artificial Intelligence, now has eschatological or extinction event potential.
Recall that another RAND prophet, Francis Fukuyama, twenty five years after Dr. Stangelove, gave us The End of History, another fiction which saw the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact as a victories for the West, the end of European if not global Communism.
Frank seems to have missed the rise of totalitarian China and the renaissance of Islamic theocratic fascism. Selective indignation and optimism are the curses of all political “sciences.”
Pollyannas on the global Left are loath to see that Mein Kampf and Moslem jihad are two incisors on the same mad dog.
It’s a safe bet that Fukuyama’s analysis sold as comedy in the Ummah and China. What really ended in the Fukuyama era was Santa Monica’s tight focus on strategy and RAND’s reliability as a strategic USAF or Pentagon partner.
In short, Fukuyama argued in journals and book stores that:
“With the collapse of Soviet Communism, liberal democracy and market capitalism emerged as the only viable, universally legitimate forms of government and the final stage of ideological evolution. History, in the Hegelian sense of grand ideological struggles, has therefore ended—liberal democracy has no serious global competitors left. Future events will continue, but they won’t involve fundamental challenges to democratic systems.”
Humbug, Frank.
The only history that ended in 1990 was strategic and domestic common sense which gave way to trendy partisan, social, and utopian political memes that have little or nothing to do with strategic threats, national security, or military readiness.
Diversity at the Pentagon in the 21st Century is not “strength;” it was an obvious echo of deep national political and cultural divisions.
If the Justice Department or state attorneys are truly serious about fraud and fiscal reform, they should begin with the non-profit sector. Think tanks first, because these tax exempt pockets of privilege often emit the sickly sweet smell of “woke,” social, and/or subversive strategic mendacity.
The telltale buzz words of empathy fraud are; “charity, public service, or non-profit.” Virtue signals borne of non-profit rackets often make tax funded corruption and sedition, not just possible, but inevitable.
Back in the day when RAND was host to great minds thinking about important matters of state like strategy, Dr. Kevin Lewis wrote a samizdat “paper” entitled the “Tumescent Threat.” A paper at RAND, unlike a study, is the lowest form of ephemera usually restricted to internal consumption.
At the time, the Tumescent Threat was a brilliant satire of RAND and Pentagon focus on all things phallic, erect, and explosive.
The days when satire, common sense, and strategic studies could coexist are long gone in places like RAND Corporation, California, or Washington DC.
Alas, at some point, corruption and fraud ceases to be a joke.
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G. Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of US Intelligence and American national security.. Follow him on X.
Follow NER on Twitter @NERIconoclast
One Response
There are approximately 2 million registered nontaxable non-profits in America today “serving” approximately 342 million Americans; one tax free enterprise for every 171 citizens. The non-profit sector is just one slice of the “official” American economy where grifters fly under the radar. Fraud is not a problem in America, it’s an industry.