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Full disclosure off the highest: I used to be a grant maker for greater than 20 years, first as a member of the California Arts Council, after which for 17 years as a member of the Youngsters and Households Fee of Orange County, California.
The California Arts Council dealt in comparatively small quantities of funds appropriated by the state legislature. It was a mini-Nationwide Endowment for the Arts.
Against this, Orange County’s “Prop 10” Commission, because it was initially recognized, distributed tens of tens of millions of {dollars} of cigarette tax income yearly to grantees devoted not directly to the mission, dictated by the language of the voter-approved initiative, of “making youngsters 0-5 and their households wholesome and able to study” by the point they started kindergarten.
DOGE UNCOVERS OVER 4M GOVERNMENT CREDIT CARDS RESPONSIBLE FOR 90M TRANSACTIONS
Proposition 10 was handed by the voters of California in 1998. The brainchild of actor Rob Reiner and former Republican Rep. Michael Huffington, Prop 10 laid a 50-cent tax on each pack of cigarettes. The cash raised thereby was divided 20% to the state’s Prop 10 Fee, and 80% to the 58 county commissions. The 80% was divided up on a per capita foundation, so Los Angeles, after all, acquired essentially the most, however Orange County acquired a big chunk yearly.
Elon Musk is main the Division of Authorities Effectivity and desires to focus on the temptations of grant makers. (Picture by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Pictures)
Every county fee needed to have a majority of its members from the non-public sector. I put up my hand to be one of many 5 non-public sector commissioners on our fee of 9 as a result of that was actual cash going out the door and I wished a say in how it could be spent.
The “job” required two conferences a month at $100 a gathering with no advantages or pension. (I could also be among the many only a few individuals topic to the California CAIR Political Practices Act for greater than twenty years who didn’t accrue a pension and who misplaced cash on each assembly.) There was a whole lot of homework, however the small employees was made up of excellent professionals, and it was public service of the old-fashioned kind.
I believe Orange County’s fee, at the least, did good work — blocking and tackling public well being stuff, paying for varsity nurses for instance, offering assist for brand spanking new moms of restricted means, and so on. We audited ourselves and, 10 years in, introduced in Bainbridge Strategic Consulting to survey our previous work and our plans going ahead and to recommend larger efficiencies. The employees was small and excellent. We employed contractors each time we might. We saved observe of the pennies.
I’d gladly have stayed on the fee for so long as I might do the mathematics, however I left California for Virginia in 2016 and, after all, resigned. I keep watch over it from afar. It’s nonetheless doing good work, as a result of it was constructed to withstand the three nice temptations of grant makers.
The primary temptation is to by no means look at the efficacy of a grant as soon as it’s made. If outcomes will not be tracked and performances can’t be measured, it’s a very good guess they aren’t price reaching for. Bainbridge offered the skin eyes, however from day one the emphasis was on data-based outcomes. If a program didn’t “work,” it went away. The primary temptation of a grant maker is to by no means have a look at what the outcomes of earlier expenditures had been. If DOGE is doing at the least that, good.
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The second temptation is to provide cash to your mates. We by no means acquired near that line as a result of the legal guidelines in California are very strict about self-dealing, and the 9 members by no means included any shy individuals. Extra vital by far: All grants had been awarded in public conferences. All had been defined within the supplies offered to the general public. Grant making ought by no means to be executed in half-light, a lot much less at the hours of darkness.
DOGE should be asking who made choices to award cash and who was watching. The scandal on the EPA appears to be the other strategy. For those who haven’t seen it, watch Administrator Lee Zeldin’s “throwing gold bars off the Titanic” video. Dashing $20 billion out the door after an election is a recipe for airmailing cash to mates.
I put up my hand to be one of many 5 non-public sector commissioners on our fee of 9 as a result of that was actual cash going out the door and I wished a say in how it could be spent.
Lastly, and most clearly, the final temptation of a grant maker is self-enrichment. It ought to go with out saying {that a} grant maker ought to by no means, ever give cash to themselves or a member of the family or to a corporation at which they count on to work. If DOGE finds that federal grants went out the door to recipients the place the grant maker ended up working … then DOGE ought to name Legal professional Basic Pam Bondi. That’s not “waste, fraud and abuse.” That’s in all probability a criminal offense.
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The tip outcomes of DOGE are laborious to foretell however the shiny mild it’s shining or guarantees to shine on grant making and different discretionary funding by federal businesses is far wanted. Scrutiny of recipients and of guidelines for eligibility to guarantee they’re clearly understood, simply defined to candidates and transparently made, is lengthy overdue. There aren’t any “small grants.” Each grant made to “A” is a grant not made to “B.” And each grant that sounds outrageous nearly definitely is.
Dig deep DOGE people. The great grant makers can have nothing to concern or disguise.
Hugh Hewitt is host of “The Hugh Hewitt Present,” heard weekday mornings 6am to 9am ET on the Salem Radio Community, and simulcast on Salem Information Channel. Hugh wakes up America on over 400 associates nationwide, and on all of the streaming platforms the place SNC may be seen. He’s a frequent visitor on the Fox Information Channel’s information roundtable hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard School and the College of Michigan Regulation Faculty, Hewitt has been a Professor of Regulation at Chapman College’s Fowler Faculty of Regulation since 1996 the place he teaches Constitutional Regulation. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio present from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has regularly appeared on each main nationwide information tv community, hosted tv exhibits for PBS and MSNBC, written for each main American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a rating of Republican candidate debates, most lately the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and 4 Republican presidential debates within the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio present and his column on the Structure, nationwide safety, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of 1000’s of company from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcast, and this column previews the lead story that may drive his radio/ TV present right now.
