NGOs and (what was) your money

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THE PROBLEM, AS OUTLINED BY DATA REPUBLICAN:

Stephen Green, April 14, 2025:

The Left is structured as a network of NGOs: ruthlessly efficient and ready to act the moment power changes hands.

The Right has no equivalent infrastructure. If I sit down and ask myself, “How would I start an NGO to implement a conservative agenda in D.C.?” … I draw a blank. Because the dominant instinct on the Right isn’t to build, it’s to dismantle. Most conservative goals center on shrinking or limiting the federal government.

That creates a fundamental asymmetry. NGOs on the Left are designed to expand state power through policy scaffolding, and once federal funding flows in, it’s nearly impossible to tear down. It would take an act of Congress to defund these mechanisms, and Congress rarely votes to shrink its own power.

So, we can’t fight fire with fire.

As I see it, there are only three paths forward (not mutually exclusive):

1. Keep scaling the existing DOGE efforts.
2. Replace the majority of Congress with people willing to shut the spigot.
3. Trigger a Convention of States and rewrite the rules from outside the system.

Each path demands broad public support, which, again, NGOs don’t need. That’s part of what makes them so dangerous. They just have to win the influence of a few.

UPDATE: Burning Madolf reminded me of this X post; I’d headline it, “How it Works”