Nonprofits in a Time of War

Note: An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Nonprofit organizations are scrambling for charitable dollars because recent experience has taught them not to depend on government money to solve public problems. It seems the money just isn't there. Or is it?

Government does manage to finance what it wants to do, but sometimes with trade-offs. Regardless of the views nonprofit leaders have had about the war in Iraq and how it has been waged, one thing is clear to people on all sides: The costs of the war have propelled government-spending cuts that affect millions of Americans and the nonprofit organizations that serve them.

Even while handing out more than a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, the Republican-controlled Congress approved enough extra off--budget spending for the Iraq war to have paid for about 50 years of Head Start for each of the million or so kids enrolled in that program. Those same dollars could have covered about 16 years of medical insurance for every child living in poverty in the United States or paid four-year state tuition for every undergraduate at every college and university in America -- and still have had a bit left over to send some on to graduate school.

In fact, federal spending on the war could have financed enough new public housing to accommodate every homeless American in permanent residences and even provided some with vacation homes. But that's not what President Bush asked for, and not what Congress gave him. The reality is that in education, housing, nutrition, and other areas, federal support for nonprofit groups that provide services was cut -- so organizations had to do more with less in the face of growing need -- while government money went elsewhere.

Instead of doing good, the money was used to finance a war, started with shameful deceit and continued in a fog of failure, denial and lies, that has cost more than 3,000 American lives, wounded more than 22,000 other American men and women, and resulted in the deaths of between 52,000 and 600,000 Iraqis -- the larger estimate is made by Johns Hopkins University scholars after careful study. Congress has already appropriated more than $350--billion for that war beyond regular military budgets, and costs are projected to total more than a trillion dollars when continuing care for the wounded is counted.

This isn't like the first gulf war, where costs were shared by a large number of nations. Americans are footing the bill for this one and will be paying it, quite literally, for generations to come.

Charities have been increasingly reluctant to speak about important public--policy issues and the need for more aid to go to domestic causes instead of the war, and foundations (save for very few) have shied away from such advocacy. But charities should realize that speaking out today does not mean getting involved in partisan politics. The war has little popular support and massive opposition -- and a very broad swath of Americans has been affected by its financial and human costs. Perhaps it would be wise if nonprofit groups that see themselves as leaders in their communities and in society listened to their followers and began to catch up with their views.

Not only has domestic federal funding failed to keep up with growing need, but since the war began in 2003, cuts have been made in more than half of the 72 federal direct-service programs tracked by the Coalition on Human Needs, a Washington group that advocates for federal policies to aid the poor. Most of the cuts went deeper than 10 percent after inflation. Federal programs that help young people, support community services, and provide mental-health services, substance-abuse prevention, child and health care, and food to the elderly are among the hardest hit.