Working with DOGE to Expose NGO Corruption and Mismanagement in Texas

---

Issue Areas

---

Recent moves by Texas leadership show remarkable alignment with federal efforts to root out wasteful spending. Speaker Burrows’ new legislative committee on “Delivery of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) nods to the federal initiative led by Elon Musk aimed at eliminating waste in the federal government.¹ Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick lists Senate Bill 14, “Texas DOGE – Improving Government Efficiency,” as one of his top 25 legislative priorities.² And last week at his inaugural luncheon, President Trump enthusiastically praised Governor Abbott, noting Texas would now “have a partner that’s gonna work with you.”³

This alignment creates an exciting opportunity to boldly target radical fiscal mismanagement that has corrupted government spending at every level. Even in the “free state” of Texas, we’re uncovering disturbing patterns of ideological capture of federal and state grant dollars that demand immediate action.

Federal Grant Abuse in Texas:

• More than $110B in active federal outlays flow through Texas to nonprofits and universities — for context, that’s more than twice as much as Texas collects from the sales tax, our state’s largest source of revenue:^4–5
  • $41B from HHS often pushing radical health policies
  • $33B from Education Department often spreading DEI policies
  • $5.5B from NSF funding activist research
• While most abuse is opaque, we can point to some egregious cases in Texas. For example, DHS was caught giving $17M to a San Antonio NGO buying airline tickets for illegal immigrants.⁶

Even Texas’ own government agencies are not immune:

• $2.5M to Texas Legal Services Center,⁷ an entity that pushes one-sided social policy: legal resources to illegal immigrants, and politically charged medical agendas.^8,9,10
• $845K to Cardea Services,¹¹ a group that pushes politically charged medical agendas.¹²

Some grant funding serves critical state needs. But much of the bureaucracy controlling these dollars actively works against Texas values, and we suspect even more abuse is obfuscated by accounting tricks—passing off dollars to “microgrant” recipients — and lackluster reporting requirements. In 2022, Governor Abbott took a bold step by calling for investigations of NGOs facilitating illegal border crossings in Texas.¹³ Unfortunately, the Biden administration stymied these efforts by leveraging federal authority and hiding dollars.

NGO funding skyrocketed over the past decades into the hundreds of billions of dollars per year in the United States; tens of thousands of these groups receive government money, sometimes misaligned with the interests of voters, and unaccountable to taxpayers who are unaware how grant dollars are spent and unable to contest grants with which they disagree.

And we don’t even know how bad the grift was from 2021-2024. In 2020 (the last year with data), domestic nonprofits reported $301 billion in federal grant receipts—a 677 percent increase from 1991.¹³ For context, that’s more than the federal government spent in that year on Veterans Affairs ($220b), the Department of Education ($94 billion), and transportation ($85 billion).

Blue: 501(c)(3) Grant Receipts
Purple: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
Red: Department of Education
Orange: Department of Transportation

Moreover, the practice of nested grant distribution obscures how taxpayer dollars are ultimately spent. Primary grant recipients often redistribute funds to sub-recipients of their choosing, who can then further distribute to additional organizations. While official budget documents may show the first few layers of fund transfers, they often obfuscate downstream recipients under opaque categories like “microgrant recipients.” This multi-layered distribution system creates a maze of transactions that masks final expenditures, enabling waste, fraud, and ideological capture.

Many beneficiaries of expansive and unaccountable grants are ideologues and unelected bureaucrats; the losers are taxpayers and suffering Americans who grants are intended to help.

But luckily, now the Trump administration is aligned to root out these ideologues and cut misguided spending. Texas should be the administration’s boldest partner, collaborating with DOGE to stop the flow of anti-American ideological grant awards and ensure tax dollars actually serve taxpayer interests. The Trump Administration will face resistance from entrenched bureaucrats; Texas’ own government efficiency efforts will be boots-on-the-ground to ensure that corruption and grift in grant dollars flowing through Texas are transparent to policymakers and taxpayers.

Texas needs smart and innovative policy solutions to uncover malfeasance, foster NGO accountability, and help stop the flow of tax dollars to wasteful and abusive organizations. The Cicero Institute’s comprehensive reforms would elucidate the scope and delivery of state and federal grant dollars to entities in Texas, requiring complete tracking of all dollars down to the final beneficiary level and enabling the public to see and help track down any malfeasance or misguided grants.

Specifically, our framework:

• Establishes a centralized Texas Federal Grant Portal for all federal and state grant awards.
• Ensures mandatory public disclosure of all grant information.
• Requires detailed quarterly financial reporting from recipients.
• Requires full reporting of all recipients and sub-recipients, down to the final dollar.
• Requires detailed tracking and reporting of metrics for all NGO stated goals and objectives.
• Empowers citizens to report ideological capture.
• Implements aggressive audit and recovery provisions.

We hope Texas leaders will consider this framework to seize upon momentum in the government efficiency movement and establish Texas as the national leader in grant transparency.