Nonprofit Links, 6/23/2026
Nan Ransohoff on the coming philanthropic tsunami; Alex Berenson on nonprofit hospitals; Joe Lonsdale's advice to donors
Some directional napkin math suggests that adding up philanthropic pools from just three sources – (1) the OpenAI Foundation, (2) Anthropic founders, and (3) Anthropic employees – translates to an additional ~$37B of intended annual spend
Oy. Just what we need—more money for the Foligarchs, the folks who direct philanthropic spending. I would rather that the oligarchs just kept the money and invested it in profit-seeking enterprises.
As a Washington Post opinion piece argued Monday, nonprofit hospitals may actually do less for their local communities than their for-profit competitors:
[Economists] found that because nonprofit hospitals cannot distribute profits to shareholders, they accumulate excess tax-free cash — and spend it on themselves. Their facility-wide general and administrative wage expenses run 26 percent higher than comparable for-profit hospitals. Their managers use the surplus to pursue what the researchers bluntly call “empire-building through capital expansion.”
The intention heuristic continues to be a poor guide for identifying social utility.
Jay Collins, Joel Finkelstein, and Colin Wright write,
A new report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) documents networks across Florida with overlapping leadership, shared funding streams, and repeated ties to individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses or sanctioned for connections to Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and Iran-aligned influence operations. These networks operate through America’s civil society framework—using 501(c)(3) status, nonprofit governance structures, and the constitutional protections afforded to religious institutions as both cover and support.
As long as someone is willing to spend, “philanthropy” cannot die, and that is precisely why it so often doesn’t work. The feedback loops that make iteration possible are almost entirely severed. A nonprofit can be wrong about everything for decades and still get the check, because the check-writer has switched into a different cognitive mode than he or she was in when the wealth was actually built.
substacks referenced above:
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"I would rather that the oligarchs just kept the money and invested it in profit-seeking enterprises."
I've often claimed that Bill Gates did more for humanity by making computing so simple even his mother could do it, by several multiples, over whatever he accomplished by funding The Gates Foundation.
When thinking about non-profits, I image a business and then remove accountability and desire to solve the problem. Reading this post I now have to include: insidiously striving against the stated mission. On a more positive note, I found that give.org, operated by the BBB, seems to be one of the better charity evaluators out there. But caveat emptor always.