Editor's note: The Unelected is a large 400 page book outlining how the U.S. government and a large network of NGOs have become a channel for
moving middle-class American taxpayer money abroad, through spending like
Ukraine aid, USAID and refugee resettlement, while working Americans struggle with housing, wages and family costs. It says the root cause is philosophical, an old ideology it calls supranationalism, and it traces a timeline from the 17th-century Treaty of Westphalia through George Soros, George W. Bush and Donald Trump. The book describes an "NGO-Administrative Complex" of federal departments, nonprofits and foundations that turns tax dollars into welfare for the rest of the world. The authors, Jennica Pounds (known as @DataRepublican on X) and Joshua Lisec, map the money, name the people involved and show how the system can be dismantled. The following investigative report is an addition to their work and how to dismantle these NGO networks.
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The Unelected Network
A critical essay on a century of NGO power
Nobody voted for the Tides Foundation. Nobody cast a ballot for Arabella Advisors, the Open Society Foundations or the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) either. Yet these organizations, and hundreds like them, help shape legislation, court fights, foreign governments and the flow of public money, and almost none of their leaders answer to voters. The arrangement did not appear overnight. It was built over a century, one foundation and one grant at a time, and the people inside it tend to know each other.