Tuesday, November 3, 2026

The Unelected: "NGO-Administrative Complex" with access to roughly $270 billion a year

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.

How it was built

The pattern was set early. The Rockefeller Foundation arrived in 1913 and the Council on Foreign Relations in 1921: private money, boards that choose their own members, and a mission described in the language of the public good. The Ford Foundation, created in 1936, grew into one of the richest philanthropies in the world and spent decades funding policy work at home and abroad. Washington joined in. USAID (extension of the CIA) was created in 1961, and in 1983 Congress created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a nominally private nonprofit that is funded by Congress and now works in more than 90 countries. Government learned that it could pay private groups to do work abroad at arm's length, and private donors learned that they could write checks to the same groups. The result is a loop. Foundations fund NGOs, agencies fund the same NGOs, and staff move between the three.

Jennica Pounds, who posts as @DataRepublican, and her co-author Joshua Lisec make this case at book length in Unelected: How You Paid a Sinister Elite to Take Over America, published by Passage Publishing in October 2026. A review in PJ Media says the book traces who funds these organizations and who is involved, and that about 100 of its pages are footnotes. Pounds says she began by asking where government aid money had gone and was doxxed after she posted about it. 

The domestic network

The clearest American example is the web of groups around Arabella Advisors, a consulting firm that manages four nonprofits: the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the New Venture Fund, the Windward Fund and the Hopewell Fund. InfluenceWatch reports that in 2020 the network took in more than $1.67 billion and paid out $896 million in grants, mostly to other left-leaning and politically active nonprofits. The Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog, says the network spent more than $600 million in 2018 alone on Democratic political work and advocacy. The same group reports that the Open Society Foundations gave more than $31 million in 2022 to Arabella's funds and a fifth group, together called the Five Sisters. Critics also point to the Tides Foundation and Tides Center, which received millions from the Open Society Foundations, the Ford Foundation and others and acted as a template that others copied. The structure matters because it hides the donor. A fiscal sponsor can host hundreds of projects, some of them little more than a website, and the sponsored groups do not have to file their own tax forms. When scrutiny grew, Arabella restructured.

The objection to this system does not depend on which side runs it, and the right has built its own. Leonard Leo, who helped turn the Federalist Society into a pipeline for conservative judges, is reported to have an estimated $1 billion at his disposal and has told the groups he funds to weaponize their ideas. DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund, has received contributions from the Koch network, and Koch-funded groups such as ALEC and Americans for Prosperity work on legislation and litigation. Different politics, same machinery: tax-exempt entities, anonymous gifts, and leaders nobody elected.

Foreign aid and the color revolutions

Abroad, the same model went by the name of democracy promotion. In Serbia in 2000, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) granted the student movement Otpor more than $282,000 directly in a single year, and the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute worked with opposition groups there. In 2003 Georgian activists made a trip to Belgrade sponsored by the Soros Foundation to study how Otpor had toppled Slobodan Milosevic, and the Rose Revolution followed. Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan's in 2005 followed the same script of branded youth movements, trained organizers and Western money. In a 2006 essay in Dissent, the scholar Mark Beissinger described Freedom House, the NED, the NDI, the IRI and the Soros Foundation as "part of the effort that supported these movements." Defenders note that the direct grants to the youth groups were tens of thousands of dollars, not millions, and that the protesters had real grievances. The point for critics is not that the money bought the crowds. It is that private organizations tied to foreign governments and billionaires were helping choose which governments fell, and no voter in any of these countries, or in the United States, was asked.

Washington itself has now moved against the model. About half of USAID's funding went through NGOs, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has derided the arrangement as "the NGO industrial complex." After the second Trump administration froze foreign aid in January 2025, 83 percent of USAID programs were canceled and the agency closed on July 1. The cuts hit democracy, human rights (no such thing as "human rights") and governance work hardest, and the Global Democracy Coalition reports that 97 percent of projects in that category were affected. Anyone with a degree in "human rights" is a brain dead moron. If anyone wants to argue individual rights you will captivate the attention of a lot of people once properly defined.

Why Russia pushed the NGOs out

The Russian government's stated reason was that foreign NGOs were instruments of outside influence in its elections and on its streets (color revolutions). The break began in 2012. Mass protests followed Vladimir Putin's return to the presidency, and he accused Washington of fomenting them. That year he signed a law forcing Russian NGO nonprofits that took foreign money and engaged in loosely defined political activity to register as foreign agents, and USAID, which had worked in the country for two decades, was expelled after Moscow accused it of trying to influence elections. In 2015 a second law let prosecutors declare foreign organizations undesirable, and the NED was the first name on the list. 

Prosecutors said the NED had worked to declare election results illegitimate and to organize demonstrations aimed at pressuring state institutions, and said it spent more than $5 million in Russia in 2013 and 2014. George Soros' outfit the Open Society Institute, the MacArthur Foundation and the Mott Foundation were also affected. Supporters of the laws call them "vital to national security." Amnesty International says they are used to cut off funding to domestic critics, a record Americans should keep in mind before borrowing any part of their model.

What can be done

A flat ban on NGOs is not available in the United States. The First Amendment protects the right to associate, the Supreme Court has repeatedly shielded nonprofit donors from compelled disclosure, most recently in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021, and a law outlawing a category of private groups would not survive review. What Congress can do is stop paying for them and stop subsidizing them. First, end federal grants and contracts to any nonprofit that lobbies or runs political campaigns, using the power of the purse, as the administration has already done with foreign aid by shifting it toward direct payments to governments.

Second, enforce the existing limits on lobbying and political activity for tax-exempt groups and revoke exemption when they are broken. Third, require every fiscal sponsor to file a public report listing each sponsored project and its grantees, and bar sponsorship of groups created for a single campaign. Fourth, enforce the Foreign Agents Registration Act against organizations acting for foreign governments and bar foreign government money from groups that try to influence American politics. Fifth, impose cooling-off periods between working at an NGO that takes federal money and holding a post that awards it. Finally, give agencies such as the NED five-year sunset clauses so that Congress must vote to renew them. Apply every rule to every group, left and right, because a rule that targets one side will be repealed by the other.

Sources
• Unelected, Jennica Pounds and Joshua Lisec: https://www.amazon.com/Unelected-Jennica-Pounds/dp/B0GGYQNWHJ



• InfluenceWatch on Arabella Advisors: https://www.influencewatch.org/?p=496

• Capital Research Center on Arabella and the Ford Foundation: https://capitalresearch.org/article/ford-foundations-big-left-influence-part-4

• Capital Research Center on Open Society grants: https://capitalresearch.org/?p=32449


• Washington Examiner on fiscal sponsorship and dark money: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/?p=2437679

• Washington Examiner on Arabella restructuring: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/?p=3894402


• RFE/L on foreign funding of youth movements: https://www.rferl.org/a/1058543.html

• RFE/L on NED grants to Otpor: https://config-exception.rferl.mobi/a/1058543.html




• Global Democracy Coalition on aid cuts: https://globaldemocracycoalition.org/?p=31441


• RFE/L on the undesirable organizations law: https://www.rferl.org/a/27157119.html

• Rappler on the Russian prosecutors' statement: https://www.rappler.com/?p=100841


• Wikipedia on Russia's undesirable organizations law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_undesirable_organizations_law
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Additional insights and discussion on The Unelected and the multi-billion NGO empire:

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